> What makes porting GPU drivers significantly more challenging than everything else?
Multiple reasons:
1) GPU manufacturers are notorious for not publishing documentation out of IP/patent concerns. Worst offender is NVIDIA here.
2) For embedded GPUs there isn't much interest in open source drivers... the big customers (think Samsung and the likes) have direct support from the chip design vendor and get drop-in drivers as part of the board support package (BSP, basically a conglomerate of bootloader, kernel+modules+initrd, firmware blobs for components such as wifi) so they don't need OSS drivers
3) The mobile GPU space is... splintered. With desktops you got the three major players AMD/ATI, NVIDIA and Intel's built-in Iris, in the GPU space there are more.
> GPU manufacturers are notorious for not publishing documentation out of IP/patent concerns. Worst offender is NVIDIA here.
I think easily Apple takes the cake from nVidia - they don't even provide drivers for anything but their platforms (that is for their proprietary GPU core). The GPU core that's actually in the M1.
A lot of this comment I don't understand how it applies to the Apple M1. I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm completely ignorant of these things. Am I just missing it?
Apple's M1 chip has a custom GPU built into it. There is no documentation on how that GPU works and Apple hasn't released any.
Making any modern GPU work is a lot of work because of how complicated they are. That's even with the full documentation.
In the Apple M1 case, the GPU will have to be reverse engineered to understand how it works, then a driver will need to be written for Linux that supports it.
Multiple reasons:
1) GPU manufacturers are notorious for not publishing documentation out of IP/patent concerns. Worst offender is NVIDIA here.
2) For embedded GPUs there isn't much interest in open source drivers... the big customers (think Samsung and the likes) have direct support from the chip design vendor and get drop-in drivers as part of the board support package (BSP, basically a conglomerate of bootloader, kernel+modules+initrd, firmware blobs for components such as wifi) so they don't need OSS drivers
3) The mobile GPU space is... splintered. With desktops you got the three major players AMD/ATI, NVIDIA and Intel's built-in Iris, in the GPU space there are more.