From: ext_1717247

2014-07-16 03:32 pm (UTC)

business as usual for ARM MPD I don't really see ARM MPD changing their ways anytime soon I'm afraid. I don't think they care all that much for anything other than their rigid use cases.

They'll just continue to supply SOC vendors with the code an these will probably make 1 build for Android and maybe another one for Chromium OS. That's what most will do, especially the smaller ones. Some will even bother with updates to these binaries. Maybe companies that care will do some Wayland builds ( Samsung for Tizen ) or something along these lines but the only thing you can really count on is having and binary for a certain version of Android for that SOC.

Something might change with ARM MPD but they can't yet see the huge market that Broadcom found with the RaspPi and to which they now provide source code and anything needed. From: (Anonymous)

2014-07-16 08:20 pm (UTC)

Thanks for quoting As people starts looking for phones with better long term support with

something like cyanogenmod, SOCs with free driver maybe get more sales.

Especially if the HW-testing sites starts to realize the correlation

between free drivers and good alternate ROMs for phones.



Its the money stupid.



Elapdump From: (Anonymous)

2014-07-16 10:35 pm (UTC)

I really wish for a really strong legal system to forbid selling devices that not comply with GPL licences when they hit the market.

We have to beg for the code, and a lot of manufacturers do not care at all. From: (Anonymous)

2014-07-30 08:36 pm (UTC)

Such touchès. Much wow. ARM MPD does provide X driver source. Haven't checked what it'ts good for, though, because it'd be interesting only if I had a Chromebook to try it on... which is not yet quite the device I want buy / own. Let's see if the FHD Samsung Chromebook ever comes out.



kkk From: libv

2014-07-30 11:05 pm (UTC)

Re: Such touchès. Much wow. From pretty early on, there has been X driver source and libump source. ARM MPD has given us that much, but some cynical part of me believes that they like the "We found mali source!!!!!" effect it has :)



But they are not that great: Siarhei based his fbturbo X driver off of the mali X driver to get more out of the available hw, and libump is now deprecated in favour of dma_buf. But they took a tiny bit of pain away. The major pain still remains: no free display infrastructure (EGL), a very unstable kernel API/ABI... It's just way too painful for ARM MPD to maintain this, and to keep on shoving responsibility off to others; be it linaro, SoC vendors or device makers... Or just me, Siarhei and Connor, as we're even going as far as fixing library dependencies in the binaries. How broken is that?



As for chromebooks, if they are ARM based, they are the T series. We're still early days on those. But we've become a lot smarter since, and we now have proper linuxes to play with :)