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Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by flakiness on Monday June 14, 2021 @03:14AM (#27500123)
The opaque, undocumented nature of mobile GPU is outstanding (not in a good sense).

Intel CPUs are well document both by their documentation or by third party docs (like Patterson-Hennessy.) Although NVIDIA is less document than these CPUs, there are some well-written whitepapers including one for academic conferences. And these are the basis for the textbook coverage.

Compared to that, ARM or Qualcomm GPUs are totally a blackbox. I'd love to learn the specifics of mobile GPUs but there is no clue. I wonder how Collabora folks have figure out the instruction set architecture and other details.

Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by KeepingItToasty on Monday June 14, 2021 @10:36AM (#27503055)
'Arm Is Now Backing Panfrost Gallium3D As Open-Source Mali Graphics Driver': https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arm-Panf...

I think Arm is providing Collabora with some of the documentation they need to write the graphics driver.

Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by flakiness on Monday June 14, 2021 @01:41PM (#27505562)
Wasn't aware of this, but cool move on ARM side! Thanks for the tip!

Looking at the code [1], some of files are indeed copyrighted to ARM. So they are actually providing some data. Also, the linked story mentions that qcom is also providing some support to thee opensource driver. Pardon my ignorance here.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/main/src/pan...

Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by CameronNemo on Monday June 14, 2021 @01:19PM (#27505279)
While this is true now, Collabora devs did a lot of reverse engineering with little documentation to get a functional driver, then ARM started to pay attention. For a long time, ARM neglected efforts to develop open source drivers.
Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by nix23 on Monday June 14, 2021 @05:35AM (#27500792)
I really wished that Intel and AMD took a leading role in ARM, things would be so much more open in the mobile space.
Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by qwertox on Monday June 14, 2021 @07:06AM (#27501240)
Interesting point of view, this sounds plausible.
Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by pjmlp on Monday June 14, 2021 @09:47AM (#27502472)
As if they don't have their own commercial agenda, like having used PowerVR SGX545 on their CPUs.
Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by nix23 on Monday June 14, 2021 @03:44PM (#27507319)
Ah yeah the cheap atom-intel way...
Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by CameronNemo on Monday June 14, 2021 @01:19PM (#27505287)
Intel and AMD, which have entirely closed source coprocessors on their chips.
Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by nix23 on Monday June 14, 2021 @03:41PM (#27507292)
But not drivers.

>entirely closed source coprocessors on their chips

Like every single Arm chip?

Re:Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost by CameronNemo on Monday June 14, 2021 @03:48PM (#27507390)
What ARM chip has a coprocessor with closed source firmware/OS running on it?