On Sat, October 22, 2011 3:52 pm, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:

On 22 October 2011 16:17, Joop Boonen wrote:

...

Hi all,

Most of the (ARM) distros are currently working on or in the transition to hardfp, but until now most GPU's in de ARM Cortex SOCs don't have any hardfp drivers yet.

To be able to have a ARM hardfp compiled X Window desktop system/notebook with 3D support we need hardfp compiled drivers.

I was thinking it might be more efficient is all Linux distro's work together to get these drivers as it's equally important for all distro that wants to move to a hardfp distro.

What do you all think, who wants to work together to get full hardfp support for as most as possible ARM SOC GPUs?

It would be great if we can in the end even have OSS drivers.

Hi,

Nvidia was the first to release hardfp drivers for tegra2 gpus for armhf, and we also have working drivers for hardfloat for the Freescale i.MX51 and i.MX53 gpus, which we use on our current and upcoming products (Genesi Smarttop/Smartbooks). It took a lot of time and effort on our side to push for that, and obviously not for technical reasons -it was just a 5 minute recompile of a binary static library.

I can imagine. I understood that the MX51 has a AMD Z430 GPU. Which has been renamed to Adreno 200 (AMD Z430), as Qualcomm bought the handheld graphics unit from AMD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageon So you probably have to go through FreeScale that might need approval from Qualcomm to build a hardfp driver. I understood that in the ARM SOC world the SOC producer is responsible for the video driver, which is very different from the PC world where the designer is delivers the driver (NVidia/AMD/Intel).

But in the end it was worth it. We're getting 15-20% increase in performance on average -sometimes more- in our GLES benchmarks, and we're working to squeeze more performance out of that -I'm currently working on neon-optimizations in the GLES1 backend, which may not be current, but it's still used by some important and very much needed applications (i.e. quake3 :).

So, the list is short right now, but that is the least of our problems. The real problem is getting all of the kernel gpu drivers into a single (mainline?Linaro?) kernel tree. The vendors are very resistant in releasing specs or source code, and the kernel guys are equally -if not more- resistant in accepting half-open/half-closed drivers into the kernel tree.

I think this is de to GPL, that why they only allow open source modules for the kernel. That's also why the proprietary kernel modules for NVidia and AMD are not in the standard kernel.

It's going to be a long road, but I think that eventually we're getting there, unless of course a miracle happens and all vendors simultaneously opensource their drivers :)

I hope it will happen soon. It feels the time when NVidia and ATI didn't build any (3D) drivers for Linux. This slows down Linux development a lot and it'll limit that hardware you'll be able to use Linux on.

Regards

Konstantinos

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