The State Of The Lima/Tamil Driver Code

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State Of The Lima/Tamil Driver Code

For those wondering about the state of the Lima and Tamil graphics drivers for providing open-source, accelerated support to ARM Mali graphics processors, Luc Verhaegen has written a new blog post after being silent for a while...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Liba-Tamil-Lost-Traction

[profoundWHALE]

So let me get this straight...

Dev works to write an open-source driver for ARM GPU
Dev knows that it is currently buggy or at least, not up to his standards
People then get mad that it's not released and ask why he's calling it open source when it's not released

Am I wrong?

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm, well, with all the unfortunate events, it does explain why libv tends to sound paranoid at times... Things like that could make anyone believe the world is conspiring against you. Though I still don't get the idee fixe on RadeonHD. The blog post does say that it would have been best forgotten by itself. Sure, it might have gone better if RadeonHD was continued (I'm always for cooperation instead of forking), but what's done is done, no sense in going back to it...

Also, in general, I really hope these projects won't end up in another case like cdrkit...

[dungeon]

Hmm, well, with all the unfortunate events, it does explain why libv tends to sound paranoid at times... Things like that could make anyone believe the world is conspiring against you.

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche... to much pessimism in that blog post He even ended tipicaly pessimistic :

This game never was about code or about doing The Right Thing, and never will be.

[nanonyme]

libv, FWIW yes, I agree the discussion on IRC was rather... odd, also from the side of your comments but I get you've been rather frustrated over the years. I really hope you do end up getting the code in a state you feel like having it published if only to be able to move on to some other interesting projects. Then again, I guess you don't really as avoid areas where projects turn political based on what you've written. This comes at a price of often ending up leaving with a bad taste in your mouth

[Luke_Wolf]

Honestly Libv, I think you really need to re-examine your life and give some serious thought as to why you write code. Do you do it because you want to contribute to open source, or you think that developing software is fun, or are you simply looking for social reinforcement, and perhaps a stardom that is not yours? I get that things perhaps haven't turned out as they should and you seem to feel under appreciated, but open source isn't a social club. Nobody is here to be an echo chamber to make you feel good about yourself, they're here to produce good software and have fun doing it, and as always in the production of something good, the work needs to be criticized so that the flaws might be exposed and the work improved. If you don't feel capable of taking that, then all I can suggest is you stop writing code for a while, a month, a year, however long it takes for you to get your life back on it's rails, and when that's done think about if you even want to go back to writing code, and if you don't, well then fine.

[profoundWHALE]

[...]
they're here to produce good software and have fun doing it, and as always in the production of something good, the work needs to be criticized so that the flaws might be exposed and the work improved.
[...]

Open-source to me is essentially sharing + peer review of your work. It's like everyone is trying to write books, while at the same time, contributing and reviewing other's. In his case, there's some sort of funny business going on. I mean, I read through the mailing list and irc chat logs and I totally get why he's having the motivation issues and paranoia that he's having.

People are suggesting crowd funding as well. If he starts a indiegogo or kickstarter I'd be on board.

[Ancurio]

I think Jasper Pierre might just be incredibly terrible at English. He kept on repeating how "lima is tainted" even though it made no sense and people pointed that out to him multiple times. I can't help but think he did mean to say "lima would be tainted by me", although that also doesn't explain why they never contacted libv for help.

Going by my limited exposure to the Android world, I have to say Mali is pretty wide-spread and works generally well; it would be a tremendous boon to have a FOSS driver for it in the open. I wish we could have payed for Luc's roof and food to have him work on it in good conscience, via a Indiegogo or something similar (Kickstarter is a no-go because it sucks for people like me without credit cards, and it only pays out money if the goal is reached).

Finally, can someone explain to me what exactly the issue was with the animosity towards radeonhd? Like, purely on a technical level? From what I understood, the driver directly manipulated the hardware instead of going through some proprietary blob interface for functionality, but I'm not too sure if that's accurate.

[GreatEmerald]

I wish we could have payed for Luc's roof and food to have him work on it in good conscience, via a Indiegogo or something similar (Kickstarter is a no-go because it sucks for people like me without credit cards, and it only pays out money if the goal is reached).

Patreon?

Finally, can someone explain to me what exactly the issue was with the animosity towards radeonhd? Like, purely on a technical level? From what I understood, the driver directly manipulated the hardware instead of going through some proprietary blob interface for functionality, but I'm not too sure if that's accurate.

Yea, that sounds about right. Full explanation by bridgman here: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...ferent-Drivers

[Ancurio]

Yea, that sounds about right. Full explanation by bridgman here: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...ferent-Drivers

Yeah thanks a bunch, that's the stuff I was looking for!