ARM as a primary architecture

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-03-21 at 13:32 +0100, drago01 wrote:
>
>> Even though I disagree with Kevin that we should block on "does not
>> have 3D drivers" .. OpenGL is imo
>> even more important on ARM (non server systems) then on x86.
>>
>> A tablet or smartphone without hardware accelerated rendering is just
>> useless (slow, short battery life).
>> But this should get better over time as more general purpose
>> distributions try to run on such devices.
>
> ITYM "as more people finally get around to reverse-engineering the
> hardware".  Honestly distributions have very little impact here.  They
> just increase demand.
>
> The only thing that gets drivers written is writing the damn driver.  If
> you think this is an important thing to have, Mesa would love to have
> your contribution.

I'm hoping soon we can add the MALI chipset with the lima driver
effort [1] into this list, it's been reverse engineered and it's a
good target as it's the ARM developed GPU that is a check box option
for those that don't want to make their own so is relatively wide
spread. Marvell might even come to the party through it's involvement
with OLPC. A lot of the others I'm not sure of, I don't hold up much
hope for any derived from the SGX stuff as even with intel and the
gma* ones there's not been a lot of movement with an open source 3D
driver, but ultimately the company that owns the IP has no incentive
as they're selling their cores for iOS devices hand over fist. Since
the beginning of the year there has been at least some positive
movement in this regard, even if in some cases it's only an open KMS
kernel driver to do some form of 2D.

Peter

[1] http://limadriver.org/