NVIDIA Open-Sources 3D Driver For Tegra SoCs 54
An anonymous reader writes "Linux developers are now working on open-source 3D support for NVIDIA's Tegra in cooperation with NVIDIA and months after the company published open-source 2D driver code. There are early patches for the Linux kernel along with a Gallium3D driver. The Tegra Gallium3D driver isn't too far along yet but is enough to run Wayland with Weston."
Excellent (Score:4, Funny)
Linus made it happen [youtube.com]!
Unfuck! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
There is no unfucking. Belive me, i'm gonna pay for another 15 years...
OUYA to benefit? (Score:2)
Will this benefit OUYA?
Re:OUYA to benefit? (Score:5, Informative)
Backer units are already shipping. It's a little late to be crapping on it as vaporware.
Re:OUYA to benefit? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OUYA to benefit? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, you let me know when I can walk down to Fry's and pick one up.
Until then, vapourware.
By that logic, it will always be vapourware because there isn't a Fry's within walking distance of me. On the other hand, you could look at the reports of the unit shipping to their backers, then see that they have a release date of April for pre-orders & June for the general public. Perhaps then you might realise that the world doesn't revolve around you. A product can be considered released without you personally being able to find one in a particular store.
We are not talking about Sony or Microsoft, with huge manufacturing and distribution capacity. The difference with this console is that you heard about it at the stage where they would normally be talking to venture capitalists. There wasn't some premature announcement designed to stop people from buying competitor's products. There was never a suggestion that this was a product that was ready to ship, it was always spoken about being in the design stage. It does not deserve to have derogatory labels just because you are impatient.
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If not OUYA then what? (Score:2)
[The Tegra-based OUYA console] is dead before it's even hit the gates.
Then which platform for playing indie games should people be backing instead?
Re: (Score:3)
You bought into Idrema and Phantom too I bet.
You're a fucking idiot if you think Ouya has even a small chance of surviving. This thing is dead before it's even hit the gates.
No, I don't own any console and I have no intention of doing so. However, me saying that the Ouya isn't vapourware is completely unrelated to whether it will survive or not.
And frankly, I don't know why you are taking this so personally?
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I still don't see it available anywhere. It's vaporware until that happens.
Then you obviously don't understand the meaning of the word, and it seems clear that you have no intention of learning it. Vapourware is not a synonym for the word unreleased.
The Ouya was not announced to dampen sales of another product. It was not announced prematurely (I don't think a year is excessive for developing a product like this). It is in the process of being released now, whether you can see it or not.
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I'm pretty sure NVidia already support Android with their existing drivers....
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Well, they're not glibc compatible. You can use them with Xorg and a standard GNU userspace via a wrapper like libhybris, which was developed for Mer [merproject.org] and is being used by Ubuntu Mobile.
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Full 3D accelleartion on Linux with Tegra (Score:1)
It's been possible for *years* now. You just use their L4T/Linux-for-Tegra/Vibrante product. It comes with ordinary glibc, a sort of hacked up mini distro based on Ubuntu tweaked to load their modified kernel and userspace. You have to use EGL instead of GLX, but otherwise everything works. If you're building embedded apps on Tegra things like Clutter work with EGL now. So very pretty custom user interfaces are possible and fully accelerated.
Looks like they(nvidia) has some support for OpenKODE as well on L
AMD news yesterday, NVidia today, that's great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:AMD news yesterday, NVidia today, that's great! (Score:4, Interesting)
How is a driver for Tegra (not even a unified shader architecture, something similar to Riva TNT2) going to help your desktop driver?
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Yeah, makes me want to love bomb both of them. Only thing I can say is, when the new game is outdoing each other in openness, everybody is a winner. Better Linux support means more computer parts sold, end of story. It's not a zero sum game.
Re: (Score:2)
Open-source drivers for a mainstream mobile GPU is ground-breakingly good stuff, Nvidia's won some karma points in my book. This big difference this makes it that this could make it possible to run a fully FLOSS OS on a mobile device, usually the problem preventing this is that the drivers are closed-source - even the N900 has this problem.
Not open source, but open documentation (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Hmm, could it be that AMD knew NVidia would announce this driver and slipped in the video announcement just ahead of it? As it stands, AMD still looks like the leader.
Re:Not open source, but open documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a full open source driver stack, then AMD is THE way to go. I know there's some effort to reverse engineer the NVIDIA closed drivers that's making progress, but there's actually paid AMD employees developing open drivers based on the opened specs for their platform. That's the good news.
Here's the bad news. The progress on the AMD open drivers is sloooooooooow because the number of paid employees working on the drivers is very few and the number of volunteers is very few too.
The silver lining is that as features get implemented, they move forward to new generations pretty nicely with the new Southern Island chipsets being an exception. The state of THOSE open drivers is an absolute mess considering devices with that chipset have been shipping for quite a while. Allegedly, that chipset will be the basis for new cards for a while, so as the support improves for the Southern Islands, new cards should benefit immediately.
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If you want something resembling modern performance, then no, you don't. Intel's chipset is at least 4 years behind AMD and NVIDIA in terms of performance. Maybe 5 or 6 years.
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what does that even mean?
Whenever a company falters in the market... (Score:1)
they magically discover the advantages of becoming more customer and developer friendly- well at least until their fortunes reverse.
Nvidia is barely managing to keep their ARM project alive. The first Tegras were bombs. Tegra2 was late, had to be heavily discounted, and couldn't decode H264 HD content. Tegra3 was late, expensive, and is no more powerful than the better parts from the Chinese competition of Rockchip and Allwinner. Tegra4 is so late and expensive, it has possibly no current design wins, and w