What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 28, 2012 16:02 UTC (Sun) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: What peculiar semantics by dlang
Parent article: Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

Is this better than what you have supplied by any other ARM system, Yes.

Just to be clear that should be qualified as: "Any other recent ARM system with a GPU". There have been plenty of ARM systems in the past which were entirely free of proprietary firmware blobs, and there may well be current GPU-less devices which are blob-free (it's fair to say that I can't keep up any more with so much hardware coming out, so don't know for sure).

And, just to keep the nitpicks complete: obviously if an otherwise blob-free device has USB then you can plug things in which themselves needed firmware blobs, but I think it's reasonable for that not to count against the core ARM board.

ARM hardware didn't used to have this terrible 'proprietary blob' problem - it has arrived relatively recently, due largely to graphics hardware vendors' behaviour (they think they are special, and have all patented themselves into corners), but also increasing device complexity and the way 3rd party SOC sections (I refuse to describe them as 'IP') get integrated/sold and engineered, which also tends to engender blobs.

What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 28, 2012 20:31 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

> Just to be clear that should be qualified as: "Any other recent ARM system with a GPU"

Yes, this is a good point. The problem is with the GPU vendors. In the ARM space, they are where NVIDIA and ATI were about 8 years ago, but in this case, it's all vendors, including Intel.

What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 29, 2012 9:13 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

What Intel chips are your talking about? Intel stopped producing ARM chips more then five years ago...

What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 29, 2012 18:04 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

Intel's mobile chipsets are just like everyone else's (except broadcom now), closed binary blobs running either in the kernel or in userspace.

What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 30, 2012 0:27 UTC (Tue) by cyanit (guest, #86671) [Link]

It seems that Intel might eventually replace Atom with scaled down versions of their laptop CPUs, and those come with documented GPUs with open source drivers.

What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 29, 2012 11:27 UTC (Mon) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (1 responses)

> they think they are special, and have all patented themselves into corners

It's ironic that patents have forced them to be even more secretive about the workings of their products, given that the entire point is supposed to be reducing secrecy. Not that anybody here needs convincing that patents in our space are harmful...

What peculiar semantics

Posted Oct 31, 2012 0:36 UTC (Wed) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

All of them are afraid that they are probably unknowingly using some patented technology (they can't check a zillion patents), and opening up would make a lawsuit about that more likely...

So yes, patents are having the opposite effect as to what they were intended for.