Rosenzweig: Writing an open source GPU driver – without the hardware

Here's a war story from Alyssa Rosenzweig on the process of writing a free driver for Arm's "Valhall" GPUs without having the hardware to test it on.

In 2021, there were no Valhall devices running mainline Linux. While a lack of devices poses an obvious obstacle to device driver development, there is no better time to write drivers than before hardware reaches end-users. Developing and distributing production-quality drivers takes time, and we don’t want users to be reliant on closed source blobs. If development doesn’t start until a device hits shelves, that device could reach “end-of-life” by the time there are mature open drivers. But with a head start, we can have drivers ready by the time devices reach end users.

Comments (17 posted)