ARM Mali-T604 Arrives, But With What Kind Of Driver?

[mwendt]

Ok great. Mesa should replace the user space libs anyway, right? Even tough it's not that insanely optimized, right?

Well.. The kernel module doesn't do much.. It receives command buffers and execute them on the relevant hardware and maps the memory buffers with the data structures it needs, but the generation of these data structures and command queues is done in the user space driver. That is highly hardware specific and adding this functionality to mesa is not a trivial task.

[V!NCENT]

Ok great. Mesa should replace the user space libs anyway, right? Even tough it's not that insanely optimized, right?

[mwendt]

The kernel device drivers for ARM's current Mali GPUs are available from malideveloper.com under GPLv2. The same goes for their drm driver (separate from their gpu driver) and their UMP device driver. (A device driver for allocating and sharing physically contiguous memory buffers. Embedded GPUs usually don't have their own memory.)

Their EXA and DRI drivers are available under MIT license and their Android gralloc implementation is available under Apache license.

It is only their user space libraries (OpenGL ES 1/2, OpenVG, EGL..) that are under proprietary license.

[V!NCENT]

What's the most open embedded GPU? Not Intel, I hope?

[cb88]

AMD/ATI sold their embedded GPU sector off to qualcom iirc. Imgagination technologies tends to rule the roost of embedded GPUS.

[curaga]

Forgot to clarify, the docs are reverse-engineered

[curaga]

Via's ARM socs only tend to have 2d, but there's code and docs for them.

[V!NCENT]

Amd has GPU's for the embedded sector. Are these Free Libre Open Documentation?

[blackiwid]

pfff they mess it up, Arm could be a big opportunity for Linux + Desktop, but they mess it up, why should anyone buy such hardware, when the biggest advantage (free fast graphic power) is not given? Why should I then not take the product from the market leader Intel?

Hope some new Arm socs are coming from companys that are not that society damaging. Econemy is there to serve humanity, our shit turbo-capatilism world tends strong to the oposite.

But I guess a big part is just stupidity, because they will sell less hardware when they go this way, and they win nothing.

[brent]

That's not my point. Maybe I have missed something, but there is no OpenCL 1.2 (yet). Heck, most vendors are still struggling with getting their implementations compliant to 1.1.