Re: screenblanker vs login

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> This still looks like a 1 man part time effort. And it will likely remain 
> so until there is arm64 support in debian.  But likely next generation 
> after stretch now.

Mali support is unrelated to Debian.  The main issue is that ARM (the
company behind the Mali GPUs) works hard to undermine any effort at such
Free Software drivers (it's much worse than just withholding
information, since the key info has already been reverse engineered
anyway).

Other relevant information is that Mali is really just the GPU,
i.e. a processor that can perform efficient computations like those used
for 3D rendering.  This is separate from the display engine itself (the
thing that takes a framebuffer and pushes the pixels to a screen), or
from the video encode/decode hardware.

So for example on Allwinner (sunxi) hardware there's recent progress on
getting support for the display engine (some of it already in mainline
Linux) and the video decoder (work still in progress).


        Stefan