On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 3:12 AM, Yousong Zhou <yszhou4t...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 4 March 2014 08:46, jonsm...@gmail.com <jonsm...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Let's hope this translates to full corporate support for upstreaming >> to mainline. > > Just curious, do current member companies of Linaro push full support > for their chips into mainline Linux? I mean, are most parts of those > chips full functional with open source drivers? I know the open > source GPU support is far from good, but to what extent is upstreaming > support to mainline part of Linaro's object?
AFAIK no member of Linaro has provided GPU driver source for the kernel. But don't hold companies like Allwinner responsible for this. Almost all ARM CPUs use GPU designs provided either by ARM, Inc or Imagination Technologies. Those two companies refuse to provide the source for their GPU drivers. Allwinner doesn't have any options here - all of the GPU designs they can pick from are controlled by companies that are closed source. The official excuse for closed source GPU drivers is that GPUs are a patent minefield. By opening the source the patent trolls would gain access to information that would let them file a bunch of annoying lawsuits. But in the last year or two both Intel and AMD have overcome this fear and open sourced their GPU implementations. Neither company received a tidal wave of GPU related lawsuits. Recently I signed a NDA for a non-GPU chip. Gone are the days of single page NDA. This one had over twenty pages of dense legalize all of which was aimed at keeping me from using any of the information disclosed in a lawsuit against the vendor. So it took two months of messing around with legal to get access to the datasheets for this chip. An hour after I was able to see the full datasheet I determined that we couldn't use the chip. Gigantic waste of time. We went with a TI chip. Publicly available datasheets and app notes for the TI chip contain more useful info than what I got out of the NDA loving company. > > Please bear with me if the questions seem to be too trivial or too > apparent as I do not have much experience with Linux on ARM. > > > yousong > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "linux-sunxi" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Jon Smirl jonsm...@gmail.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
