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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

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dman·

What is the story around linux drivers for the GPU?

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Horrendous - PowerVR is one of the worst companies wrt open source. You do get OpenGL ES 2.0 blobs, though.

Who has the best support when it comes to gfx?

Open source graphics? Intel (they actually have an open source driver team), then AMD (they at least provide decent hardware documentation), then pretty much everyone else ships binary blobs and doesn't document anything.

Big parts of the VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi) are documented - though not completely (especially the video acceleration unit is not yet publicly documented, officially for the reason that you have to pay license fees for some video codecs):

http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/

From the embedded GPUs VideoCore IV is as far as I know thus the most open (but rather the one-eyed among the blind).

The kernel part is open while the user space is in binary blob form.

But is it available without publicly without signing an NDA / jumping through hoops? Would love to get this working on as a small debian box.

Everything should be on https://github.com/mips. Please have a quick look and tell me if there is something missing that you'd like to see.

Why the choice to go with a locked down GPU? Apart from openness concerns what about people who don't want to use Linux? Folks who write their own OS or use it bare-metal? This is a real downside to the RPi right now.

I've been wanting to do stuff with MIPS instead of ARM, but this board won't be it.

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