On 5 March 2014 00:10, jonsm...@gmail.com <jonsm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
Not knowing these information before and can be counted as another
bunch of reasons why patents are bad.
I tend to think Linaro as a place for the ARM world to standardize
things and upstreaming code to the Linux kernel is just a by-product.
Thanks, Jon.
yousong
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