Imagination Working On A New Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Project

[starshipeleven]

...really? How come do they want open-source now?

They are on the verge of extinction, everything is worth a shot. If this works and they don't die off, their management will probably change a bit their minds about decent opensource support.

[starshipeleven]

Their biggest former customer (apple) stole their own hardware design, so they ll have to fish for others I guess

fixed

[Emmanuel Deloget]

...really? How come do they want open-source now?

(This is my opinion; and despite my assertive tone I might be wrong).

The real, only reason: Imagination has been forced to make this choice by a company to which it wanted to sell its GPU. So they don't want open source ; they just need it.

[Guest]

this will again result in nothing. If they would just have released register level specifications we would have already a fine open source driver a decade ago. Wonder why they still don't want to do that and have skilled people work on this. Also. even if this employee gets something working, it will be a pain to maintain without any open specifications.

It's always better, if there's official support and development of OSS drivers. Look at Intel, it does nice job for OSS driver for their iGPUs. However, they should have already published sheets with information needed to implement full-featured drivers.

[rene]

It's always better, if there's official support and development of OSS drivers. Look at Intel, it does nice job for OSS driver for their iGPUs. However, they should have already published sheets with information needed to implement full-featured drivers.

No, usually vendor drivers are low quality, Windows style code mess, that needs major rewrites and cleanups to meet minimal code quality levels and be accepted upstream.

[log0]

Their biggest former customer (apple) stole their own hardware design, so they ll have to fish for others I guess

Afaik the've got a license agreement, don't they?

[starshipeleven]

Afaik the've got a license agreement, don't they?

Yeah, it happened after Apple going on its own for a few years. I suspect they didn't get a highly profitable licensing agreement with Apple this time, it's enough to not die maybe but it's not as good as before.

[frep]

As i can read, this means that an open source (generic) driver is in the making not something dedicated for performance under Linux. This can be the difference. Or maybe something interesting for future risc desktop pcs

[starshipeleven]

No, usually vendor drivers are low quality, Windows style code mess, that needs major rewrites and cleanups to meet minimal code quality levels and be accepted upstream.

Please note: for companies that care about upstreaming, the developers doing the "major rewrites and cleanups" are still the same people paid by the vendor.

Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, NXP and Marvell for example

[vb_linux]

So, which ARM vendor does support open source graphics ?

Rpi has its blob, not sure how much Tegra is open source from Nvidia ?