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Arm Officially Supports Panfrost Open-Source Mali GPU Driver Development
Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide a particular bug is not important to them, so you'd be out of luck.
So the developer community has long tried to reverse-engineer GPU drivers with projects like Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), Etnaviv (Vivante), as well as Lima and Panfrost for Arm Mali GPUs. Several years ago, Arm management was not interested at all collaborating with open-source GPU driver development for Mali GPUs, but as noted by Phoronix, Alyssa Rosenzweig, a graphics software engineer employed by Collabora, explained Panfrost development was now done in partnership with Arm during a talk at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2020).
[...] So that means a stable Panfrost driver should be expected quite earlier, and possibly with higher quality, than if the company still had to spend time and resources on reverse-engineering.
Related: Pagamigo: FOSS Python Script for PayPal Payments (Alyssa Rosenzweig)
Nvidia Announces $40 Billion Acquisition of Arm Holdings
Nvidia-Branded ARM CPUs; UK Trade Union Speaks Out Against Deal
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BananaPhone on Friday September 18 2020, @08:54PM (1 child)
How long is that going to last, now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2020, @06:56PM
My thoughts exactly. I trust the Suited Whores at Nvidia about as far as i can throw them.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday September 18 2020, @08:57PM (3 children)
Sounds like NVidia is buying them, which I honestly can't see as A Good Thing (tm) for ARM in general. So who's to say that in a month or three, whenever the deal goes through, the new owners don't support Panfrost.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 18 2020, @09:04PM
The deal could take 1-2 years, more than enough time to make progress.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2020, @01:21AM (1 child)
I share the skepticism about NVIDIA with their history of antagonism to free software. But, NVIDIA has already made an exception to firmware signing to allow Nouveau to be used on their Tegra SoCs, so maybe for embedded SoCs like what Mali has been used on they will continue to be less shitty toward free software.
Alternatively, perhaps NVIDIA is abandoning Mali after acquisition of ARM, and doesn't want to support it anymore, so are influencing ARM to free it. Seems kind of doubtful, though. But, it does seem like freeing proprietary information for the first time in ARM's history, at the same time the sale of the company is announced, that the buyer would have some say in the decision.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2020, @02:52PM
I'm sure NVIDIA is already planning to kill off Mali, but many of the boards with those chips will continue to be sold for at least another half decade, probably longer.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday September 19 2020, @09:26AM
Back in the day Nvidia had a developer similarly assist Nouveau in renaming identifiers and organizing structs to match what they use internally in the proprietary upstream but it never really amounted to anything beyond that. It's generally believed they went through that since they wanted (and still want) the upsteam FOSS driver to be just good enough to reach a GUI where users can accept their EULA and deploy proprietary drivers.
So, while it's still quite helpful of them, I wouldn't get my hopes up.
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