Re: Upcoming Qt switch to OpenGL ES on arm64
On Monday 26 November 2018 22:04:04 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 12:18 AM Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
>
> <perezmeyer@gmail.com> wrote:
> > So: what's the best outcome for our *current* users? Again, pick
> > only one.
>
> here's a perspective that may not have been considered: how much
> influence and effect on purchasing decisions would the choice made
> have?
>
> we know that proprietary embedded GPUs and associated proprietary
> software are not just unethical, and cause huge problems, they also
> hurt company profits and cause increases in support costs.
If they choose to support it, I've found most are in it for the initial
sale, and its up to you to make it do useful work. This seems to be the
case with the rock64's, Odroids and such, very close to zero support,
Pi's are buckets better, yet the pi has hardware specs and design
compromises that can seriusly impact its performance. Only two data
paths in the pi skip the internal usb2 hub it uses to do most it its
i/o, one is the radio for wifi, the other is the gpio/spi. Everything
else has to fight for a turn at getting thru that slow hub, which
translates to millions of keyboard and mouse events being thrown away.
Its too busy.
Fortunately, when that gets to be too painfull, a reboot or sometimes 5
will eventually arrive at a condition where the mouse and keyboard Just
Works(TM). And then it works till the next power failure which may be
several months. Both pi and rock64 uptimes are excellent.
>
> by complete contrast, when all the source code is libre-licensed, this
> is what happens:
>
>
> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Intel-and-Valve-collaborate-to-
>develop-open-source-graphics-drivers-1649632.html
>
> basically what i am inviting you to consider is that in making this
> decision, the one that supports, encourages and indirectly endorses
> the continued propagation of proprietary 3D libraries is one that is
> going to have a massive world-wide adverse financial impact over time.
>
> i would therefore strongly recommend prioritising decisions that
> support libre-licensed GPU firmware and PCIe GPU cards that have
> libre-licensed source code.
>
> if systems with etnaviv are "punished" for example by this decision,
> that would not go down too well. if people running older Radeon GPU
> Cards (on the RockPro64 which has a 4x PCIe Card that easily runs at
> 2500 MBytes/sec) find that their cards perform badly, that is also not
> going to go down well.
>
> bottom line: your decisions here have far more impact than you may
> realise.
>
> l.
--
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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