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It is curious that Qualcomm continues to develop their own closed source driver instead of throwing their weight behind Rob Clark's Freedreno initiative. Broad

It is curious that Qualcomm continues to develop their own closed source driver instead of throwing their weight behind Rob Clark's Freedreno initiative. Broadcom at least pay someone to develop a FOSS driver for the VideoCore IV and V, as found in the rPi.

wtallis 9y ago
The situation has historically been the exact opposite for WiFi drivers, where Broadcom is the obstinate closed-source vendor and Qualcomm-Atheros is the most open-source friendly vendor in that market.
- petecox 9y ago
  Interesting times for upstream Linux support; Qualcomm also hopes to acquire NXP - the chipmakers inside the etnaviv-driven Purism phone.
  - paranoidrobot 9y ago
    NXP is also the company inside a pretty huge range of smartcard systems (eg travel cards, credit cards, etc)
- hedora 9y ago
  Atheros and Intel are by far the best WiFi options for Linux. However, Atheros lean heavily on a giant closed baseband processor blob that does most of the heavy lifting. I’m not sure how true this is of the Intel chipsets.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    iwlwifi (and iwn on the BSD side) have always non-free.
  - wtallis 9y ago
    Atheros only started using proprietary firmware with their 802.11ac generation. (Some of the older USB adapters also needed firmware but there's open firmware available.) Intel's been using proprietary firmware blobs basically forever. Everybody uses proprietary firmware for their 802.11ac adapters. Mediatek has gotten some interest because the firmware for some of their 802.11ac chips is fairly minimal and doesn't get in the way of substantially improving the open-source drivers.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Atheros -WAS- great, before qualcomm took them over, open source drivers, great chipsets and even open source firmware. Post qualcomm takover, their new chipsets are all heavily locked down, and only functional with a huge closed source driver-esque firmware megablob that is buggy and preforms poorly. You cant even set your mac address anymore. Tying qualcomm to the atheros reputation for open source friendly chipsets is an insult.
stefan_ 9y ago
I mean, they are paying.. one guy. And god knows he has done a better job than their 10s of in-house developers, but then again this is also an ancient chip and Broadcom doesn't even do graphics silicon anymore. Curiously Qualcomm have been submitting more and more, big, patches for the MSM subsystem, the Linux in-kernel part of the Freedreno graphics driver. I think someone has finally woken up and told management that Linux doesn't take two drivers for the same hardware, and once that reverse-engineered stuff was in the tree, you are royally fucked because you now have to play by the rules of whoever is maintaining it if you want to have any hope of upstreaming your proprietary driver. This is pretty much the situation for the Vivante polluters. They have been so ridiculously ungrateful for the Linux stuff that makes the chips run for the SoC companies that want to integrate their silicon that by now there is a reverse-engineered driver (Etnaviv) in the tree. They are shut out. And on a longer timescale, the same is coming up for ARM and it's Mali (Lima project).

wtallis 9y ago

The situation has historically been the exact opposite for WiFi drivers, where Broadcom is the obstinate closed-source vendor and Qualcomm-Atheros is the most open-source friendly vendor in that market.

petecox 9y ago
Interesting times for upstream Linux support; Qualcomm also hopes to acquire NXP - the chipmakers inside the etnaviv-driven Purism phone.
- paranoidrobot 9y ago
  NXP is also the company inside a pretty huge range of smartcard systems (eg travel cards, credit cards, etc)
hedora 9y ago
Atheros and Intel are by far the best WiFi options for Linux. However, Atheros lean heavily on a giant closed baseband processor blob that does most of the heavy lifting. I’m not sure how true this is of the Intel chipsets.
- busterarm 9y ago
  iwlwifi (and iwn on the BSD side) have always non-free.
- wtallis 9y ago
  Atheros only started using proprietary firmware with their 802.11ac generation. (Some of the older USB adapters also needed firmware but there's open firmware available.) Intel's been using proprietary firmware blobs basically forever. Everybody uses proprietary firmware for their 802.11ac adapters. Mediatek has gotten some interest because the firmware for some of their 802.11ac chips is fairly minimal and doesn't get in the way of substantially improving the open-source drivers.
throwaway2048 9y ago
Atheros -WAS- great, before qualcomm took them over, open source drivers, great chipsets and even open source firmware. Post qualcomm takover, their new chipsets are all heavily locked down, and only functional with a huge closed source driver-esque firmware megablob that is buggy and preforms poorly. You cant even set your mac address anymore. Tying qualcomm to the atheros reputation for open source friendly chipsets is an insult.

stefan_ 9y ago

I mean, they are paying.. one guy. And god knows he has done a better job than their 10s of in-house developers, but then again this is also an ancient chip and Broadcom doesn't even do graphics silicon anymore. Curiously Qualcomm have been submitting more and more, big, patches for the MSM subsystem, the Linux in-kernel part of the Freedreno graphics driver. I think someone has finally woken up and told management that Linux doesn't take two drivers for the same hardware, and once that reverse-engineered stuff was in the tree, you are royally fucked because you now have to play by the rules of whoever is maintaining it if you want to have any hope of upstreaming your proprietary driver. This is pretty much the situation for the Vivante polluters. They have been so ridiculously ungrateful for the Linux stuff that makes the chips run for the SoC companies that want to integrate their silicon that by now there is a reverse-engineered driver (Etnaviv) in the tree. They are shut out. And on a longer timescale, the same is coming up for ARM and it's Mali (Lima project).