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Free video drivers for Raspberry Pi
by admin ·
As the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced in a press release, now could yet proprietary userland portion of the video driver of the Raspberry Pi be under a free license.
As emphasized Alex Bradbury, lead developer for Linux at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in the press release, so that the entire ARM code for the device is open source under open source licenses available. Was therefore, he explains, with the Broadcom BCM2835 is the first manufacturer of a system based on ARM multimedia SoC that it consistently provides open source drivers.
The code Broadcom now under the 3-clause BSD license published implemented, EGL, OpenGL ES, OpenVG and OpenMAX. Bradbury sees beside the philosophical profit of freedom the ability to extend the code as the main prize. So you can now try for example, incorporate the Wayland EGL EGL client and server support. The developers aim to further that vchiq messaging system to get into the mainline Linux kernel.
Exactly from this direction comes harsh criticism of the manner of disclosure of the Broadcom BCM2835 and the way in which the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which the press release supposedly represents euphemistically. The criticism comes from two people who are otherwise seldom agree. Graphics driver developer Luc Verhaegen and David Airlie, DRM developers for the Linux kernel complain both that the press release makes no mention of a firmware blob that must be loaded at boot the board.
Verhaegen criticized not believe that such a binary firmware package to be charged, but there shifted parts of the driver.Besides the expected setup routines and other non-critical things Broadcom has the implementation of OpenGL ES shifted into the firmware. Verhaegen dissolved in comments to the press release from a lively discussion about terminology by postulated passing in binary video core blob but all the magic, while the now disclosed userland portions of the driver only or messages and data would be back and forth.
Arlie David writes in his blog that the implementation of the GLE (Graphics Layout Engine) prevented the firmware means that developers can write extensions for it or fix bugs. For Arlie this is not a press release worthy. He also strongly doubts that the Broadcom driver creates in this form into the mainline kernel.
Tags: drivers, Raspberry Pi, video