Ah, too bad the GPU driver is still closed-source. Hopefully they do indeed release that open source driver they apparently promise... I kinda expected most RISC-V boards are going to be open hardware, but maybe I was wrong to assume that, heh
But to do so, they used git head mesa3d, experimental kernel patches to get the kernel part working, and firmware blobs they took from the proprietary driver.
We'll have to wait a little more, but will get system images with all of that already working. Eventually, it'll all be upstream.
It helps that large amounts of these boards (more than every RISC-V SBC before, combined) are getting to developers. This was the whole point of the boards after all.
In fairness, that's what I'd expect for new hardware; out of tree patches, then head, then unstable/rc/beta releases, then eventually normally stable versions. The firmware blobs are unfortunate, though.
The usual fare is, unfortunately, just an android kernel source tarball that has been modified so that it works with the hardware, with no history of changes nor documentation of the hardware.
The situation with GPUs, specifically, is really bad.
Intel, AMD and now Imagination Technologies are about the only ones, that I am aware of, who seem to care about open drivers.
They were catching up at some point, and NVIDIA started doing that.
There aren't any/many GPUs they could use with open source drivers are there?
I'd like to see one with a bunch of small RISV-V cores running llvmpipe as a GPU, but it's not clear how good that would be.
A GPU as I understand it is simpler than a cpu, but parallel. That to me seems like it would lower barriers to entry. But that obviously isn't the case, so I must be missing something.
https://www.think-silicon.com/neox-graphics
Of course, an open instruction set is also not enough to write drivers.