

Nvidia Still Working On Open-Source For Tegra Driver - mtgx
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIzNTQ

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kelnos
Forgive me if I'm not terribly excited. Tegra2 has been around for... over 3
years now. It's certainly showing its age: so-so graphics, no NEON, only the
16-register variant of VFPv3, crappy memory bandwidth.

I'm not surprised it's taken so long to get this much, though, given what
their closed-source under-NDA drivers looked like back in 2009 (I was working
for a company building something based on Tegra2). At that time they didn't
even give us full source for the driver, but what they did give us was a mess
of binary blobs and ginormous abstraction layers. For a while there was
actually a user-space daemon that you had to run that sat between the X11
driver and the kernel. (To be fair, though, nvidia isn't unique in the
embedded world in doing crazy proprietary things on top of Linux.)

An open source Tegra3 driver would be much more interesting, but I'm sure we
won't see that until Tegra3 isn't top-of-the-line anymore.

Granted, it's pretty rare in general for a manufacturer to open source their
drivers for any of their SoC lines (even last-gen ones), so nvidia at least
deserves some praise for that.

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JoshTriplett
Quite a few of those abstraction layers and userspace interfaces exist solely
to insulate between GPLed code and proprietary code. An Open Source driver can
and should do away with those.

~~~
kelnos
Not really. Most of the abstraction layers are there for portability.
Unnecessary portability, since in the end, Nvidia decided to drop support for
everything but Linux for their Tegra2 line.

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microwise
Well atleast now we are seeing NVIDIA putting more effort into Open Source
drivers.

