There is a new alliance to accelerate ARM related Linux developments: http://www.linaro.org/ FreeScale is also a member, promoting the iMX515. For details, see the website, for a quick analysis, see: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News ... es/?kc=rss

CzP news service daemon :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Everyone but Qualcomm then.

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Matt Sealey

nVidia is also missing, while Tegra2 is used in a number of very interesting Linux based devices (The Kno: http://www.kno.com/, boxee: http://www.boxee.tv/ )

Also, it is worth to take a look at http://wiki.linaro.org/Linaro1011 I don't know, if they checked powerdeveloper.org, but reading the plans, I see many things from PD.O brought up there :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

A nice summary of the Linaro effort: http://lwn.net/Articles/391189/

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Something caught my attention there:
I'm a bit puzzled how they intend to do plumbing of graphics, given all those SoCs have their proprietary 2D & 3D video parts, which the respective vendors already do 'their best' at supporting. Perhaps they mean on a mid-level library level, e.g. cairo, widget libs et al? Or did i misunderstand it altogether, and they meant that not as a self-propelled initiative but more like an extra dev support channel?

A first version of Linaro technical requirements is available here: https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/T ... quirements
And as far as I can see, they are working on to make graphics drivers easier available:
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/u ... stack-on-x

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Wishful thinking. Anyone can say "Graphics drivers will rock more if they were DRI!!!!" - it is not always true that the developers of those graphics chipsets agree with that, though. In the case of every partner in Linaro, they don't own their graphics IP - it's PowerVR, Samsung or maybe even a Fujitsu part. Open source 3D for those devices is not going to happen just because it's on a wiki page.

This is unfortunate but true. In the case of the AMD core though (Z160 and Z430), now Qualcomm have control over it, they seem to be providing some DRI support for the MSM chipsets that include it. However, I have some serious doubts that a clunky little DRI shim and support in Mesa is going to satisfy the performance needs of Qualcomm themselves or any of their board/phone partners. Mesa is horribly inefficient in places. You will just end up with a closed source libGLES.so that is essentially compiled Mesa (as it is BSD licensed) with a lot of internal optimizations to keep their proprietary advantage over competitors (like Freescale..)

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Matt Sealey

yes, basically my original suspicion was in-line with what Matt posted above. i just don't see the sincere motives behind the 'Let's make the world a better place for SoC GPUs' slogan.

apropos (and i hope you'll excuse me for repeating myself), i'd really love to get my mittens on a blit-sound efikaMX GLES edge, as i'm about to start porting some of my fat codebases to the platform and i plan on adding some new features, so i'd prefer to be able to tell when i screwed up something with GLES performance, which currently is impossible to do due to the sw blit obfuscating most performance readings :/

We have yet to see, what they do with graphics, but for the rest one can see, that there is progress. Just take a look at a new blog entry: http://www.linaro.org/is-linaro-a-distribution/ which explains a few things on what and why they are doing. And an alpha2 snapshot is also released https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Alpha2 which runs on Beagle Board or Qemu.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Both headless :)

Shame that distribution building is now basically release a console and then bring a GUI out a year later.

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Matt Sealey

Well, reading the experiences of the openSUSE ARM and SPARC port (yes, there is one :-) ), reaching the headless base system stage is more difficult and time consuming, than adding a GUI or anything else to it later on...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

The beagleboard is not headless. It even features dvi. The only thing the beagleboard lacks is network.

And OpenGLes 2.0 rocks on the beagleboard. Yes it does that via an propiarity closed source driver, but is that bad? ... i dont mind ... as long as its api is open.

So trying the linaro alpha 2 is now on my to try list for the beagleboard.

The Linaro builds are headless :)

You get a compiler toolchain, which is.. wicked awesome, I guess.

They're not really demonstrating the things that Linaro can really push which is integrating all those proprietary closed source drivers and weird non-mainlined utility libraries into the Linux builds, packaging and so on, so that it all works out of the box.

For a toolchain on a console though it's a good start. Maybe people will finally quit using Codesourcery compilers from 2008.. :D

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Matt Sealey