HW Acceleration Working

[dkryder]

yeah, it's kinda like audi dealer saying, "i'm sorry, your alternator is made by bosch, we are not responsible that it does not work."

[HayseedGeek]

I'm far from an IP attorney, and have never been a packager or maintainer, so this topic is well above "my paygrade," so to speak. But I'm wondering if anyone can compare and contrast the situation with this driver with other similar, but different past scenarios such as the nVidia video driver or ndiswrapper wifi wrappers. Could not this content be distributed via a non-foss/GPL, i.e. proprietary, repository for those who want to compile and use on their own machines, with the understanding that it violates Open Source principles?

I'm quite satisfied with the video as is, as it suites my purposes- so I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I am confused by it all.

[ssvb]

I'm not a lawyer myself. But there are two license related problems here:

1. The HDMI output kernel driver is a binary blob, which is linked with the rest of the GPL licensed code in the kernel. It is unrelated to 3D graphics and Mali, but still something that preferably should be resolved.

2. The Mali userland blob is a proprietary code. There are no GPL problems here because it is living in the userland. And ARM actually has a permissive license for this blob (see http://malideveloper.arm.com/resources/d...e-drivers/ for more details). The only license related problem here is that Allwinner people have removed this ARM's license notice from the package that they passed over to us. I have no idea why they have done this (of course ARM's license notice explicitly forbids removing the license notice from the package), but just adding the missing license notice back should resolve everything.

[pfeerick]

I'm not a lawyer myself. But there are two license related problems here:

1. The HDMI output kernel driver is a binary blob, which is linked with the rest of the GPL licensed code in the kernel. It is unrelated to 3D graphics and Mali, but still something that preferably should be resolved.

2. The Mali userland blob is a proprietary code. There are no GPL problems here because it is living in the userland. And ARM actually has a permissive license for this blob (see http://malideveloper.arm.com/resources/d...e-drivers/ for more details). The only license related problem here is that Allwinner people have removed this ARM's license notice from the package that they passed over to us. I have no idea why they have done this (of course ARM's license notice explicitly forbids removing the license notice from the package), but just adding the missing license notice back should resolve everything.

Thanks for that ssvb... I was hoping someone else would think the system library exception applied. The GPL 3 definition is certainly easier to understand on that point, detailing that a system library's source is not included in the corresponding source that must be supplied with the code. I wonder if the reason for the missing license has something to do with hangovers from r5 of the code, as ARM state that they changed the license in January 2016 to make it more permissive, and allow redistribution of the code.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

I'm not a lawyer myself. But there are two license related problems here:

 <snip>

 ...  but just adding the missing license notice back should resolve everything.

No, its not quite that simple. Um, the $10,000 question is "why?" was the license stuff removed ?

Could it be that some of the proprietary code used GPL licensed material ?

This problem is 'way' more complicated that anyone is talking about. If it were easy Simon would have packaged this weeks ago !  If it were easy the documentation would have been forth-coming weeks ago. The truth is that this situation does not have an easy fix; please excuse my bluntness, but things don't get any easier with a bunch of lawyer wannablies spreading rumors about how easy this legal ( and technical ) issue is.  That just gets the whole rumor mill started up again making the community at large believe a vast number of false-hoods.  its just not helpful.

[dkryder]

so how proprietary are the pine64 mali400MP2 drivers compared to mail400MP2 drivers for other sbc that use that identical GPU. any possibility of obtaining drivers from a different sbc ?

[MarkHaysHarris777]

so how proprietary are the pine64 mali400MP2 drivers compared to mail400MP2 drivers for other sbc that use that identical GPU. any possibility of obtaining drivers from a different sbc ?

well, there's a question... 


... and certainly that would help with reverse engineering.

[Gnx]

Curious if any progress was made on this topic. Id really like to be able to pull up a video if I need to, doesnt even have to be hd.

If not im patient. Thanks for trying//the work you do.

[bmarquismarkail]

Gnx: Hardware acceleration in general, or reverse engineering the userspace drivers?

[Gnx]

Gnx: Hardware acceleration in general, or reverse engineering the userspace drivers?

HW acceleration. Just been a while since any news, was wondering if anything had happened on it yet.