Libre-SoC Open-Source GPU/VPU Project Loses Key Funding

Longtime Phoronix readers may recall the Libre-SoC project that for the past 5+ years has been wanting to build a libre/open-source SoC for graphics acceleration and other uses.

It started out as wanting to be a quad-core RISC-V SoC and aiming for 25 FPS @ 720p performance with 5~6 GFLOPS compute power... But then they shifted focus from RISC-V to OpenPOWER for its ISA.

There hasn't been many milestones to report recently for this open-source project, unfortunately. The Libre-SoC.org project site continues to read:

"Welcome to Libre-SOC

We're building a chip. A fast chip. A safe chip. A trusted chip.

A chip with lots of peripherals. And it's a VPU. And it's a 3D GPU..."

Unfortunately, the future is even more in question now with NLnet pulling future funding for the project.

The NLnet Foundation foundation had sponsored 550k+ EUR to the project across various grants while now future funding is being pulled.

It was announced on their mailing list today that NLNet has decided to suspend the acceptance of new project applications for Libre-SoC and related initiatives due to "current challenges facing these projects and the resulting uncertainties regarding their future direction."

There does appear to be some other project drama going on as well hindering the effort. It was already doubtful whether they'd be able to pull off this libre SoC chip as a capable Vulkan accelerator and if/when it would finally happen or go the way of the prior EOMA-68 effort. But given NLNet cutting future funding for the project, it's looking even less likely that this open-source hardware SoC will materialize.