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What does the "userland" subset encompass? What's left in closed source blobs?
by potkor 14y ago
What does the "userland" subset encompass? What's left in closed source blobs?
- ambrop7 14y agoNothing AFAIK. The kernel part has already been open source in the Raspberry Pi kernel fork: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/tree/rpi-3.2.27/drivers/misc/vc04_services https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/tree/rpi-3.2.27/drivers... The userland part is the implementation of hardware accelerated OpenGL ES 2 and OpenMAX (video acceleration), at least.
- wladimir 14y agoAFAIK everything that runs on the ARM is now open source. The firmware of the GPU itself could still be a blob. That's very cool, I hope NVidia follows suit wishful thinking.
- ambrop7 14y agoNo, userland means that it runs in user space, as opposed to within the kernel. Firmware is another matter of course.
- asb 14y agoYes, but all our kernel code was already open. Everything that runs on the ARM is now FOSS.
- makomk 14y agoThanks to Nouveau reverse engineering, you can actually run a number of recentish OpenGL GPUs with a completely open source stack including even the GPU firmware itself. Now, I guess NVidia could put a high-powered processor on their GPUs and move their entire OpenGL driver stack onto it as "firmware" so that they could claim their drivers were open source, but that doesn't seem like something they'd do.
- wladimir 14y agoI certainly know about Nouveau. I even contributed to it, albeit indirectly (I'm the guy that wrote decuda). But reverse engineering GPUs is a thankless process, which has to be repeated for every new release of the hardware (in a certain sense, even for every stepping). Of course the tools are better these days so a part of reverse engineering can be done automatically, but still... And sure, having the userspace and kernel driver open source is only a start. But having everything that runs on the CPU open source is great from a separation-of-concerns perspective. Open sourcing the firmware and even the hardware itself would be cool, but is a battle for another day... And that'd no more be a matter of the just the GPU, but of all hardware that has firmware, including the CPU, network equipment, 3G radios...