SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.
compiling...