Re: request/sugestion to work together to get hardfp/OSS ARM GPU drivers and/or to get documentation
On 22 October 2011 16:17, Joop Boonen <joop.boonen@boonen.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Most of the (ARM) distros are currently working on or in the transition to
> hardfp, but until now most GPU's in de ARM Cortex SOCs don't have any
> hardfp drivers yet.
>
> To be able to have a ARM hardfp compiled X Window desktop system/notebook
> with 3D support we need hardfp compiled drivers.
>
> I was thinking it might be more efficient is all Linux distro's work
> together to get these drivers as it's equally important for all distro
> that wants to move to a hardfp distro.
>
> What do you all think, who wants to work together to get full hardfp
> support for as most as possible ARM SOC GPUs?
>
> It would be great if we can in the end even have OSS drivers.
Hi,
Nvidia was the first to release hardfp drivers for tegra2 gpus for
armhf, and we also have working drivers for hardfloat for the
Freescale i.MX51 and i.MX53 gpus, which we use on our current and
upcoming products (Genesi Smarttop/Smartbooks). It took a lot of time
and effort on our side to push for that, and obviously not for
technical reasons -it was just a 5 minute recompile of a binary static
library. But in the end it was worth it. We're getting 15-20% increase
in performance on average -sometimes more- in our GLES benchmarks, and
we're working to squeeze more performance out of that -I'm currently
working on neon-optimizations in the GLES1 backend, which may not be
current, but it's still used by some important and very much needed
applications (i.e. quake3 :).
So, the list is short right now, but that is the least of our
problems. The real problem is getting all of the kernel gpu drivers
into a single (mainline?Linaro?) kernel tree. The vendors are very
resistant in releasing specs or source code, and the kernel guys are
equally -if not more- resistant in accepting half-open/half-closed
drivers into the kernel tree. It's going to be a long road, but I
think that eventually we're getting there, unless of course a miracle
happens and all vendors simultaneously opensource their drivers :)
Regards
Konstantinos
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