Nvidia Still Working On Open-Source For Tegra Driver

phoronix.com

16 points·mtgx··5 comments

Forgive me if I'm not terribly excited. Tegra2 has been around for... over 3 years now. It's certainly showing its age: so-so graphics, no NEON, only the 16-register variant of VFPv3, crappy memory bandwidth.

I'm not surprised it's taken so long to get this much, though, given what their closed-source under-NDA drivers looked like back in 2009 (I was working for a company building something based on Tegra2). At that time they didn't even give us full source for the driver, but what they did give us was a mess of binary blobs and ginormous abstraction layers. For a while there was actually a user-space daemon that you had to run that sat between the X11 driver and the kernel. (To be fair, though, nvidia isn't unique in the embedded world in doing crazy proprietary things on top of Linux.)

An open source Tegra3 driver would be much more interesting, but I'm sure we won't see that until Tegra3 isn't top-of-the-line anymore.

Granted, it's pretty rare in general for a manufacturer to open source their drivers for any of their SoC lines (even last-gen ones), so nvidia at least deserves some praise for that.

Quite a few of those abstraction layers and userspace interfaces exist solely to insulate between GPLed code and proprietary code. An Open Source driver can and should do away with those.

Not really. Most of the abstraction layers are there for portability. Unnecessary portability, since in the end, Nvidia decided to drop support for everything but Linux for their Tegra2 line.

The thing I'm interested in is whether this has anything to offer for Tegra2 based phones - like my P990, still stuck in the past..

Well atleast now we are seeing NVIDIA putting more effort into Open Source drivers.

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