ARM Mali Mesa Driver, New Code & Overclocking

[AJenbo]

I think it is not so much about hiding crappiness, but instead doing market segmentation in drivers. IOW, sell the same design to different customers and unlocking OpenCL, video decode or whatever only if they cough up the $$$ for the driver that supports it.

I don't say that they are doing it now, just that they might want to keep this as an option for later.

+1 Best answer.

[chithanh]

I think it is not so much about hiding crappiness, but instead doing market segmentation in drivers. IOW, sell the same design to different customers and unlocking OpenCL, video decode or whatever only if they cough up the $$$ for the driver that supports it.

I don't say that they are doing it now, just that they might want to keep this as an option for later.

[droidhacker]

Why are they unhappy with open source? Obviously its because all of their customers (chinese SoC's) want to keep the crappyness of the whole thing under wraps.

[smitty3268]

The "official stance" is total BS. What's the real reason why? Lawyers and stupidity?

Do you think one of us works for ARM and knows the secret details? The blog posts what supposedly came from an internal secret source - that's as much information as we're ever going to get.

[bnolsen]

From the blog post:
He also gives his oppion on the points they make.

The "official stance" is total BS. What's the real reason why? Lawyers and stupidity?

[shmerl]

So, will this driver allow running Wayland on Mali GPUs?

[AJenbo]

From the blog post:

they see no advantage in an open source driver for the Mali, and believe that the Lima driver is already revealing way too much of the internals of the Mali hardware. Plus, their stance is that if they really wanted an open source driver, they could simply open up their own codebase, and be done

He also gives his oppion on the points they make.

[libv]

any indication as to why arm doesn't like the LIMA driver? Do they have some problem with their gpu becomming mainstream and dominant ??

Did you read the blog entry?

[bnolsen]

any indication as to why arm doesn't like the LIMA driver? Do they have some problem with their gpu becomming mainstream and dominant ??

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ARM Mali Mesa Driver, New Code & Overclocking

The Lima driver is slowly but surely progressing for supporting ARM Mali graphics hardware in an open-source world. A Mesa driver has been started, their demo code can be faster than the binary driver, user-space memory management is being tackled, and evidently the management at ARM Holdings isn't too happy...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM4NTQ