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Free drivers for ARM graphicsFree drivers for ARM graphicsPosted Sep 26, 2013 9:45 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018)Parent article: Free drivers for ARM graphics
The big one missing is IMX, AKA Imagination (OMAP, IPad, latest Exynos...)
AIUI, Rob worked on Adreno because he could not work on Imagination as he was employed by TI at the time, and had potentially access to the source code. He did manage to use GPL'd header files to pull some 2D out though.
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Free drivers for ARM graphics Posted Sep 26, 2013 13:04 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
i.MX6 has Vivante GPUs. For PowerVR based SoCs there is a reverse-engineering project started but there are not many people working on it unfortunately:
Free drivers for ARM graphics Posted Sep 27, 2013 19:02 UTC (Fri) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link]
There are also technical issues with SGX, to the point that people are being discouraged of even looking at it.
There are other GPUs that have an even smaller market share and nobody working on them:
* Creative Labs / Ziilabs (formerly 3D Labs) ZMS: almost nonexisting in the market, so nobody bothered reverse engineering so far, but interesting technoloy. Part of Ziilabs was apparently sold to Intel last year.
* Samsung "fimg": this was the first reverse-engineering project for an ARM GPU, now at https://github.com/tom3q/openfimg/wiki, but unfortunately Samsung abandoned their own GPU design before it had a chance to get anywhere. The s3c64xx/s5p64xx SoCs were once popular but this was in the ARM11/ARMv6 age.
* Broadcom VideoCore IV. The Raspberry Pi was already mentioned, which uses VideoCore IV as the "main" CPU and an ARM11 to run Linux. There are actually phone SoCs based on modern ARM cores with VideoCore IV used exclusively as the GPU. I don't think there is any work on free GPU drivers for those chips, although reverse-engineering the instruction set (as someone mentioned in another post here) is certainly going to help.
* HTC bought the "S3" GPU division from VIA some time ago. Chances are that they are planning to come out with a new SoC for HTC phones with their own GPU at some point. At the moment those are just rumors at best,
* IIRC WonderMedia had their own GPU at some point but moved to Mali now. I don't know any details, but I assume this was a fixed-function GPU, no programmable shaders.
* Digital Media Professionals Inc. has an OpenGL ES3.0 GPU called SMAPH that is used in some Renesas SoCs, and an earlier GPU that was used in the Nintendo 3DS. That's all I know about them.
* Takumi has an OpenGL ES2.0 GPU called gs3000. No word about their customers.
Free drivers for ARM graphics Posted Sep 26, 2013 15:10 UTC (Thu) by robclark (subscriber, #74945) [Link]
you are thinking of SGX (or the new generation, RGX).. I suppose most people just sort of hope that IMGtech will wither up and go away, which seems like it is well on the way to happening.. ie. OMAP and related TI parts aren't much volume anymore, intel has switched to their own GPU, and apple is rumored to be working on their own GPU.
Free drivers for ARM graphics Posted Sep 27, 2013 18:22 UTC (Fri) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link]
Renesas and Mediatek are two SoC vendors that ship large volumes of SGX GPUs, although they are mainly in China and less present in Europe and North America. The Allwinner A31 (unlike A10, A13 and A20) uses SGX as well, but that might turn out a one-time mistake like the previous Exynos5 (5410) that gets rectified in the next version. Still, I don't think there is much hope that the products just go away.
On the plus side, the company is actually opening up slightly now, as they are getting their feet wet with contributing upstream Linux architecture support for their Meta CPUs as well as by getting involved in MIPS Linux (ImgTec recently bought MIPS Technologies). I hope they eventually follow the lead of Nvidia, who are also (slowly) getting more open about their GPUs after becoming involved in the community with their Tegra SoCs. Realistically I think it won't happen before we have upstream support on all other major GPUs and they start seeing pressure from the market.
Free drivers for ARM graphics Posted Sep 28, 2013 12:13 UTC (Sat) by robclark (subscriber, #74945) [Link]
> Renesas and Mediatek are two SoC vendors that ship large volumes of SGX GPUs, although they are mainly in China and less present in Europe and North America. The Allwinner A31 (unlike A10, A13 and A20) uses SGX as well, but that might turn out a one-time mistake like the previous Exynos5 (5410) that gets rectified in the next version. Still, I don't think there is much hope that the products just go away.
I wouldn't be surprised if some (esp. samsung) keep making a few devices w/ sgx in the near future as a hedge and/or bargaining chip when it comes to discussing cost/schedule with ARM. I suspect sgx 5xx does still have a slight power advantage against mali (would explain why you see it in the exynos5 targeted at phones), although in the area where sgx once was king, they are fading fast.
> On the plus side, the company is actually opening up slightly now, as they are getting their feet wet with contributing upstream Linux architecture support for their Meta CPUs as well as by getting involved in MIPS Linux (ImgTec recently bought MIPS Technologies). I hope they eventually follow the lead of Nvidia, who are also (slowly) getting more open about their GPUs after becoming involved in the community with their Tegra SoCs. Realistically I think it won't happen before we have upstream support on all other major GPUs and they start seeing pressure from the market.
it really would be nice to see IMGtech open up. And ironically (considering how hostile they have been to open src in the past) they are the ones with the most to gain and the least to lose by opening up. Closed source and buggy are really not a great combination.
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