
Arm Officially Supports Panfrost Open-Source Mali GPU Driver Development - conductor
https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/09/18/arm-officially-supports-panfrost-open-source-mali-gpu-driver-development/
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tomalpha
Is this perhaps a foretelling of what is to come?

If Arm plan to drop Mali completely, to be replaced by something from Nvidia,
this could be an early step to washing their hands of driver itself.

Edit: That was a bit cynical. More charitably, open sourcing the driver under
these circumstances would allow the community to continue to use and support
Mali even if Arm were looking to discontinue it.

~~~
Ericson2314
Even if NVidia is going to abandon Mali, why give consumers less reason to
switch and not jump ship to some hypothetical RISC-V thing? (Before one might
say "well, it was already closed source".)

I want to believe this is some mid-level employee going rouge trying to
salvage what they can before the inevitable rent seeking :D.

~~~
core-questions
I don't get why everyone is so negative about Nvidia Arm. Is it not possible
that this leads to good competition in the datacenter, and pushing prices down
generally?

~~~
kmeisthax
Nobody likes working with Nvidia, and nobody trusts Nvidia to continue
licensing ARM designs and patents under the same generous licensing terms that
ARM was. There's several different ARM licensees that make their own designs
or repackage ARM designs in custom SoCs. Nvidia would materially benefit from,
say, refusing to license designs and patents to competing silicon vendors. It
would take Tegra from "that thing the Switch uses" to the only option
available for smartphone vendors.

You know how everyone hates Qualcomm because they more or less pushed every
other SoC vendor out of the market with aggressive patent licensing terms?
Imagine that but worse.

~~~
ksec
Doing that doesn't hurt majority of the current licensees, only smaller ones.

Making Tegra competing with say Mediatek doesn't gain Nvidia much.

Stop Licensing ARM would put $40 Billion down the drain. ( Arguably it is only
$12 Billion cash with stocks )

I also dont see Nintendo have problem working with Nvidia.

That doesn't mean Nvidia is good or bad. I just dont see how Nvidia's
interest, ARM Interest, and most people ( including on HN ) 's interest align.

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ATsch
For context, when Alyssa Rosenzweig initially started this reverse engineering
effort, she published releases via TOR out of fear of retribution from ARM.
This was in response to the mysterious firing of the main person driving
earlier reverse engineering efforts with clear hints at pressure from ARM. All
allegedly of course, please don't sue me.

~~~
mkl
Mysterious firing of who by who?

~~~
pabs3
Alyssa's blog post links to this blog post:

[https://libv.livejournal.com/27461.html](https://libv.livejournal.com/27461.html)

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dtx1
I still don't understand the reluctance to get their drivers into the mainline
kernel under an open source license. They have nothing to lose and so much to
gain. Any SBC, Phone, Notebook will be easier to sell if it can run a mainline
kernel. Android Updates will become much less of a problem and just the sheer
amount of free QA work in form of bugtracker items should be well worth the
effort. I do hope nvidia starts to realize this aswell and makes their drivers
less closed and annoying to use on linux.

I suspect the issue is a little bit of licensing and a lot of "management" and
people that think that "proprietary" is a good thing.

~~~
josteink
> Any SBC, Phone, Notebook will be easier to sell if it can run a mainline
> kernel.

I’m pretty sure that’s only a convincing argument to a very small market
segment.

And I say that as someone who has bought a PinePhone.

~~~
heavyset_go
Being able to run a mainline kernel means being able to receive updates
indefinitely, and being able to run any Linux derivative that you want, not
just Android.

When I recommend hardware, I recommend hardware that will have a long life.
Lately, recommending phones and tablets has been tough, because only certain
manufacturers and models guarantee software updates, and then only for a small
window of time. After that, you're expected to upgrade even if your phone or
tablet works perfectly fine.

Hardware that can run a mainline kernel might change that, however.

~~~
ndesaulniers
> Being able to run a mainline kernel means being able to receive updates
> indefinitely

I wouldn't say indefinitely. Hardware that runs Linux today, mainline or not,
is not guaranteed to continue to run newer kernel releases. Drivers and even
whole architectures do get dropped from the tree, though they get reverted if
anyone actually notices and still cares about such support.

While indefinite sounds nice, it turns out that indefinite support is not
quite what people actually want in practice, even if they exclaim otherwise.
Typically, because then they're responsible for maintenance, and the common
response there is "no thanks."

I'm all for getting everything upstream though!

~~~
heavyset_go
> _I wouldn 't say indefinitely_

I mean that indefinite updates are an ability enabled by being able to run a
mainline kernel. Without a mainline kernel, there is no ability for someone to
keep their hardware updated should they so choose. It's off the table
entirely.

------
ChuckMcM
This gives NVidia an go to market strategy for ARM licensees, use the
"community" GPU that is bundled with your ARM license or use the "pro" GPU
that costs an additional $$ and you license drivers from NVidia.

------
marcodiego
I wonder for how long this will continue, considering NVIDIA has just bought
ARM.

~~~
Subsentient
I'm expecting this to be another Oracle/Sun acquisition, e.g. annihilates
everything the old company's customers ever liked about them. So no, I don't
think this FOSS contribution will continue. Nvidia is notoriously hostile to
open source.

~~~
bazooka_penguin
Nvidia has been contributing to open source scientific computing, ml, and
simulation libraries for a while now to support CUDA's adoption

~~~
m4rtink
Yet CUDA is still fully proprietary & total vendor lock-in...

~~~
londons_explore
Kinda surprising AMD hasn't made their own CUDA compiler and set of libraries.

~~~
tpxl
They have (sort of): [https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-
Tools/HIP](https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP)

It just isn't very good yet.

~~~
gnufx
However, it features in the preparation for the Frontier supercomputer, I
think, though I can't immediately find the OCLF material I saw.

------
varbhat
Nice. May benefit pinephone ,etc. aiming to become Linux-Phone .

~~~
entropicdrifter
I think Pinephone uses Lima drivers rather than Panfrost.

That said, it will certainly help the Pinebook Pro and many other SBC-based
projects

~~~
dathinab
Wasn't panfrost used by Puri.sm the libre 5?

~~~
blendergeek
No. The Librem 5 uses a Vivante GPU which uses the Etnaviv free/libre driver.

~~~
dathinab
Thanks

------
dleslie
This is good news for Pinebook Pro users.

~~~
jandrese
I'm also hoping this means I can finally get working GPU drivers for my old
Pine64 board. I had a couple of projects that got shelved because the graphics
situation on that board was such a disaster.

~~~
entropicdrifter
That would be the Lima driver, different project. Hopefully ARM helps with
that too, but Lima is a bit more mature than Panfrost and it is used for older
hardware, so ARM might not think it's worth the effort.

------
bfrog
Will it matter when its all closed source blobs because nvidia?

------
shmerl
Let's hope Nvidia won't kill it, pushing blobs and CUDA instead, like they
block Nouveau from working properly.

------
tasty_freeze
The article starts by saying:

"Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making
it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs
to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide
a particular bug is not important to them, so you’d be out of luck."

Why is it then that nvidia is singled out for hatred in this regard? nvidia is
an evil, baby-killing company for not open sourcing its drivers, but all the
others with closed drivers (including ARM up until today) don't get hated on.

The drivers are not open source, but nvidia has released quite a few open
source projects. I admit I haven't used any of them, maybe they are shit, I
don't know. I just googled "nvidia open source" to find them.

[https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source](https://developer.nvidia.com/open-
source) [https://github.com/NVIDIA](https://github.com/NVIDIA)

~~~
jorams
Nvidia is singled out for hatred on desktop, because everybody else has
cleaned up their act quite a bit. ARM is practically irrelevant on desktop, so
the fact that ARM only has closed-source options is just not that big of a
deal.

ARM is very relevant on mobile, and on that front so much is closed that
basically everything deserves plenty of hate. The GPU is not a frontier there.

~~~
MayeulC
nVidia is collaborating on their embedded Tegra driver. Rather, they are
driving its open source development. nouveau is a viable option on the desktop
GPUs, if not a performant one due to the lack of re-clocking, at least it
works. LIMA, Panfrost, Etnaviv, freedreno, V3D... The last bastion is powerVR,
but I am afraid that this might never happen.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181112100406/https://libv.live...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181112100406/https://libv.livejournal.com/26972.html)

