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Graphics Open Source Hardware Technology

Qualcomm Begins Contributing To Reverse-Engineered Freedreno Linux Driver 19

Posted by Soulskill from the doing-it-right dept.
An anonymous reader writes: For over two years there's been a Freedreno driver project that's been reverse-engineering Qualcomm's Adreno graphics hardware. Freedreno consists of both a user-space Gallium3D driver providing OpenGL / OpenGL ES support and a DRM/KMS kernel driver to replace Qualcomm's open-source kernel driver designed just around Android's needs. The community-based, reverse-engineering Freedreno driver project is finally paying off and gaining critical momentum with Qualcomm now contributing to the driver. QuIC through the Aurora Forum provided Adreno A4xx hardware support to the Freedreno MSM kernel driver.
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Qualcomm Begins Contributing To Reverse-Engineered Freedreno Linux Driver More

Qualcomm Begins Contributing To Reverse-Engineered Freedreno Linux Driver

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  • Someone in the know please explain why this is needed? I am not aware of any non-mobile hardware powered by Qualcom graphic chips. Is this for going to be bitcom-mining GPU farms?

    • I am not aware of any non-mobile hardware powered by Qualcom graphic chips.

      Qualcomm is in all sorts of embedded, not just mobile, and Android is only a share of mobile, much less embedded.

      Is this for going to be bitcom-mining GPU farms?

      GPU mining of bitcoin is dead. GPU's are still useful things, though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 )

      Or maybe someone might just want to run Linux on mobile hardware without being shackled to Android? Or maybe someone is planning on coming out with some new non-Android mobile hardware and they want the graphics performance not to suck...

      I can think of several possible reasons for this right off the top of my head. You drank too much of the Kool-Aid.

    • There are only a few Snapdragon SBCs from Inforce. But that'll change as ARM mini-PCs take more market share.

      • I don't use my Odroid U2 [hardkernel.com] as the primary desktop only because it can't do multi-head.

        Perfectly silent, has enough oomph to run a modern browser, can ssh/ssh -X/vnc/etc to machines used for work just the same as the big noisy clunker I got under my desk. Only difference, big compiles will be done when sshed.

        • These days there seems to be a lot of people out there that think a computer isn't useful unless it can play all the latest 3d games and somehow these people have gotten into deciding what is and isn't good for Linux.

    • Doesn't the Android driver employ some kind of binary blob? Maybe Qualcomm are tired of expending resources on it.

      If freedreno becomes good enough for everyday use and can be retrofitted to work with Android then Qualcomm can reduce their software division.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hvdh ( 1447205 )

      This is for custom-ROM Android phones and maybe some embedded ARM platforms.
      To build a custom ROM (e.g. CyanogenMod) with a newer Android version than what is available from the vendor,
      you need a matching driver for the GPU.
      The latest official firmware for my phone (Huawei G330) is Android 4.0.4. It contains the QCom GPU driver build for
      Android 4.0. To make a CyanogenMod ROM for Android 4.4, you would need a QCom GPU driver for for SoC for
      Android 4.4, which is not available as QCom only delevops/delivers th

  • Are they going to contribute to the kernel driver only (which probably doesn't result in Qualcomm sharing any information not already in their Android kernel driver) or to the userspace bit too (i.e. the stuff in the Android blobs)?

    If its just the kernel driver, big deal, its the userspace blobs where all the juicy stuff is...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      If you know the history of Adreno, you'll know it's actually based on an ATi (now AMD) chip.

      Way back when (nearly 15 years ago), ATi was one of the first companies that made a mobile GPU back when people didn't even think you needed one (when embedded chips had framebuffers for graphics). Eventually they sold their mobile GPU division to Qualcomm who rebranded it Adreno.

      So a lot of the Adreno's internals are based on AMD insides so a lot of it is actually documented by AMD.

      Anyhow, it's likely Qualcomm only

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