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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Actually, they did not design anything, or that's not described in the article.

Besides, no mention about the fact that there's a complete lack of graphics drivers for ARM under Linux, which is one of the most problematic issues for anyone who wants to build a desktop/laptop with it. No ARM SoC manufacturer has any open source effort for drivers, and reverse-engineering efforts have stalled for the most part.

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Reverse engineering efforts have only stalled for ARM SoCs using PowerVR GPUs from Imagination Technologies. However for Qualcomm Adreno and Vivante GPUs, the freedreno and etnaviv projects are steadily and quietly moving forward; both have been integrated into mainline Mesa at this time.

For instance, I learned from HN last week that you can run android on i.MX6 with open source GPU drivers. This is a big deal. See: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2017/04/27/andr...

What about Nvidia's powerful K1/X1/P1 Tegra chips? Any hope there?

The Google Pixel C runs using the Nouveau open-source drivers.

> No ARM SoC manufacturer has any open source effort for drivers

Eric Anholt at Broadcom has been working full time on open source VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi) drivers for quite some time now. https://anholt.github.io/twivc4

Yeah, the article doesn't suggest that they tied down a particular design.

I don't think that the server class chips have display controllers so you would just use an external PCIe card with them.

NVIDIA have Linux 32-bit ARM drivers available on their download page, right next to the x86 versions.

Those are drivers for the regular GPUs that you plug into a PCI slot on an ARM server. I don't think they'd work with the onboard GPU on the Tegra SoC.

I thought nvidia had some opensource driver effort (somewhat ironically) for their ARM chips?

Yes, used in production for the Pixel C.

Is it developed by nVidia themselves though? Usually Nouveau is driven by the community.

NVIDIA has actually contributed some code to Nouveau to make sure that it will work with the Tegra platform (the graphics engine there, unlike on every x86 platform, isn't behind a PCI bus). Also, the display part of the Tegra SoCs is entirely different from what the desktop chips have and is controlled by an open source driver written by NVIDIA (tegradc).

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