ARM Posts A New Mali Display DRM Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ARM Posts A New Mali Display DRM Driver

ARM developers today posted their first public version of a DRM driver for their Mali Display Processors...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ARM-Mali-Display-Driver

[LoveRPi]

Great news! Thanks for posting Michael. Jem Davies had a change of heart? This is a great day for ARM based SoCs.

[schmidtbag]

Great news! Thanks for posting Michael. Jem Davies had a change of heart? This is a great day for ARM based SoCs.

Eh... assuming I understand the products correctly, this should've been released a while ago. ARM is making a big mistake neglecting Linux for as long as they have. Linux makes up a pretty hefty percentage of their total sales, and they would be selling a LOT better if they improved their GPU and Linux kernel support. One of the primary difficulties of Linux on ARM is proper hardware accelerated rendering and/or video decoding, and Mali being as common as it is makes that difficult. ARM is alienating a big chunk of their userbase. From what I recall, only Nvidia, Freescale, and Broadcom seem to have the most comprehensive GPU drivers.

[pal666]

One of the primary difficulties of Linux on ARM is proper hardware accelerated rendering and/or video decoding

since it is done by mesa userspace drivers, this kernel driver will not do any acceleration

[boxie]

Linux makes up a pretty hefty percentage of their total sales, and they would be selling a LOT better if they improved their GPU and Linux kernel support.

I would argue that they have quite good support for Linux. They supply their partners with kernel source that makes their graphics work well. It is just not upstreamed.

[c117152]

Phoronix: ARM Posts A New Mali Display DRM Driver

...stalled Lima driver project...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Display-Driver

inb4 Luc posts a review on his blog

Seriously though, I'm sure Luc is taking a look at this. If I recall correctly from the way he left things off last time, he made it pretty clear he's just exhausted from ARM playing dirty so hopefully this should at least peak his interest

ARM pretty much matched nVidia in the sheer amount of animosity they gathered against them in the FOSS community. So, even if it's just a reference for now, it's nice to see ARM making some effort.

[LinuxID10T]

One of the primary difficulties of Linux on ARM is proper hardware accelerated rendering and/or video decoding

Not entirely true. The main problem is the lack of any video scaling without using the decoding block and 2D acceleration.

[andreano]

I get the impression that with DP500, DP550, DP650, ARM has invented yet another texture compression format: ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC). Remember, S3TC was very uncool, then ASTC came to the rescue. Now this "licensed IP" crap, wtf???

How do we judge this? Friend or foe? Panic or not? Apart from marketing material, there seems to be very little info on this yet.

[Ardje]

To most of the people here: Actually this has nothing to do with GPU's. This is pure interfacing to HDMI for instance. This is like a very elegant DMA controller to clock out your display buffer(s) mixed with other buffers to another device, like a screen.
A GPU is something completely different, but usually the GPU acts on the same framebuffer, hence interfacing with the display interface almost solely through memory. (vsync has to be handled somewhere, but it might as well be in software).
(sheez, I should look at the article dates next time)