drm_hwcomposer: Allowing Mainline Linux Graphics Drivers To Work On Android

[starshipeleven]

ARMv6 single core 528 MHz CPU downclocked to 384 MHz.
192 MB RAM, of which only 96 MB was addressable by Linux, the rest was allocated to the RIL and GPU.
256 MB flash storage, which was for both the RO system, **AND** RW userdata.

It must be also stated that Android ran like total shit on that hardware (or was basically little more than a cellphone), it stopped sucking hard at 512MiB of RAM (380-ish actually usable) with a dualcore at 1 GHz, and it reached decent performance on 1 GiB of RAM and again a good dualcore or a quadcore.

[starshipeleven]

Ummm.

Because they have?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_(software)

That's a compatibility layer, it sure is damn cool, but isn't "integrating Bionic stuff in Linux" any more than Wine is "integrating Windows stuff in Linux".

[droidhacker]

It must be also stated that Android ran like total shit on that hardware (or was basically little more than a cellphone), it stopped sucking hard at 512MiB of RAM (380-ish actually usable) with a dualcore at 1 GHz, and it reached decent performance on 1 GiB of RAM and again a good dualcore or a quadcore.

Actually, the HTC Dream ran extremely well, until Android grew too complex for it. Dream on Android 1.6 was brilliant.

[andrei_me]

Any Collabora developr or robclark or Etnaviv developer can say something about how to stitch everything together? How to use android with recent kernel and mesa drivers?

[robclark]

@Collabora: How about some instructions on building AOSP+drm_hwcomposer+freedreno for that DB410c? Its all nice to talk about it, but we could really use some actually description of what needs to be done to make it happen in the real world.

droidhacker, andrei_me this should help: https://github.com/robherring/generic_device/wiki

That said, you need to update a couple trees to pull in the hwc2 stuff, and chasing AOSP master is a bit of an, umm, adventure sometimes (repo-sync-roulette)..

[amehaye]

For me the big news here is getting a little bit closer to running a mainline LInux kernel on Android, and with an open-source GPU driver to boot (hehe).

Sure, each manufacturer puts its own drivers and other stuff in the kernel, making it harder to port to newer kernel versions. However the closer the Android kernel is to mainline the easier the porting would be. And now with the work of robclark and others, the biggest problem - the GPU/display stack - is generally taken care of.

Maybe one day we'll actually get timely updates as well as newer Linux/Android versions on 'abandoned' (as in 2 years old) devices.

[andrei_me]

this should help: https://github.com/robherring/generic_device/wiki

Thanks, another question, were you involved somewhere in this process?

[PluMGMK]

But hasn't Replicant already been able to use Mesa and LLVMPipe? Or am I missing something here?

[skierpage]

For me the big news here is getting a little bit closer to running a mainline LInux kernel on Android...
Surely the bigger news is someday being able to run Android apps in a Linux desktop. Whatever the Android Runtime for Chrome OS does to run Android in a container can be applied to Linux.