Quoting Gordan Bobic gordan@bobich.net:

Unfortunately there is no way I could make it, but on the subject of 3D support on ARM, Luke recently mentioned something that initially seemed outlandish but upon closer examination doesn't seem like a bad idea. As we all know, the state of openness of specifications of commonly used ARM 3D GPUs is at best dire. What has been proposed is a bit radical, but it doesn't actually seem that implausible. Specifically, combining Open Graphics Project (http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php) and the xilinx zynq-7000 or similar (dual core Cortex A9 + FPGA). The idea is to have an OGP GPU in firmware in FPGA. In terms of the power budget, it seems to work relatively sanely considering what it is, and it is as ideal as it gets as far as openness and flexibility goes.

I just thought it's worthy of a mention.

It does seem outlandish, but it is kind of cool. Is it going to give enough 3d speed? The next gen tegra is supposed to have a 24 core GPU.

It is probably more sane then my idea of just having a test suite from digital video out -> digital video receiver/capture card to get known test results. Then you could set up a hinted genetic algorithm based on a comparison. It would only work with digital video signals though.

[ok i'm going to do another cross-post in a bit which will give some background and also perhaps some other topics for discussion, but i wanted to cover this first. apologies for people for whom this is just noise]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 7:01 PM, omalleys@msu.edu wrote:

...

the xilinx zynq-7000 or similar (dual core Cortex A9 + FPGA). The idea  is to have an OGP GPU in firmware in FPGA. In terms of the power budget,  it seems to work relatively sanely considering what it is, and it is as  ideal as it gets as far as openness and flexibility goes.

I just thought it's worthy of a mention.

It does seem outlandish, but it is kind of cool. Is it going to give enough 3d speed? The next gen tegra is supposed to have a 24 core GPU.

if nvidia have a published announcement of their plans to release a fully free-software-compliant 3D driver to match the proprietary hardware, then that would be brilliant news [about their next gen GPU].

about the zynq idea: it actually doesn't matter if it's "enough". the very fact that free software developers - and people who want to be free software developers - around the world could even _remotely_ consider buying one of these for an affordable price instead of $750 for the present OGP card means that more people can at least begin to try to address the unbelievably wide and very discouraging gap between us and proprietary 3D hardware.

the NREs on producing a set of masks are _only_ $250,000 if you are a taiwanese company asking TSMC, but for everyone else they're at least $2 million. the development costs if you use off-the-shelf tools before you even _get_ to the point where you can ask a fab to produce those masks spiral out of control (Mentor Graphics charges something like $250,000 per month or maybe per week per user; NREs for peripheral hard macros can be $50k to $100k each etc. etc.), taking the total development costs in many cases to well above $USD 30 million.

and that's excluding all that "proprietary software" which of course is utterly useless without the corresponding hardware but, because of USA Accountancy Rules, where "IP" can be added to the books to increase the value of a company, there's a strong financial disincentive to consider just "givvin it aww away 4 fwee".

and here we are with a CPU which could well be around the $25 - $30 mark in large enough volumes, presented with the possibility to say "**** u all, you proprietary GPU companies and your greed, fear, patent warfare and lack of willingness to collaborate and cooperate".

ok maybe not those exact words but you know what i mean :)

l.

On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 07:15:34PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

Hi folks,

Following on from the founding of the cross-distro ARM mailing list, I'd like to propose an ARM summit at this year's Linux Plumbers conference [1]. I'm hoping for a slot on Thursday evening, but this remains to be confirmed at this point.

We had some lively discussion about the state of ARM Linux distros at the Linaro Connect [2] event in Cambridge last week. It rapidly became clear that some of the topics we discussed deserve a wider audience, so we're suggesting a meetup at Plumbers for that bigger discussion.

ok. allow me to give some perspective and background as to why i believe that a bigger discussion is important, and to whom that discussion is important.

a few years ago i read what seems like a silly book, called "The Strategy-Focussed Organisation". sounds trite, but i was advised to read it when i proposed some ideas and was confronted with the very valid question "why should i [a lowly "developer"] _care_ about this 'strategy' that you are proposing?" (fortunately the person who asked the question was the same one who advised me to read this "silly" book).

it's a tough one, isn't it? why should any of us - as free software developers - _care_ about the state of ARM Linux? you're getting on with the truly crucial task of managing the distro that you're committed to. it's a focussed job: it's a vital role, and you should not let anyone tell you otherwise.

yet... and this is the bit that this silly book explained: it's just as important to know where *your* role "fits in" with what else is going on. linaro, for example, as you no doubt well know, is tasked (by its subscribers who pay $1m / year) with sorting out vital underlying infrastructure that ties what *you* are doing in with the subscriber's ARM CPUs. you're doing the user-facing stuff; they're doing the CPU-facing stuff. that's *their* strategic role: in concrete terms it means sorting out gcc with ARM optimisations, and it means seeking out and/or increasing the number of areas of shared and refactored code across as many places as possible, in order to reduce the software development effort required of their subscribers. linux kernel. device tree. LSB. (and, it has to be said, _if_ the stupid, stupid 3D GPU companies got with the picture, linaro could well take gallium3d for example under its wing, too).

so the key question is: if linaro is "taking care of" this aspect, because that's linaro's role, then why _should_ any distro maintainer care? yes they should be aware of what's happening, but there's no real incentive to get pro-actively involved, is there? all that's required is passive acceptance of the work filtering down from linaro...

and this perhaps explains the lack of response to the proposed meetup, steve.

[the other reason is that yes, although _discussion_ can take place about 3D GPUs, we as free software developers feel "powerless to act" in the face of so much money. despite the fact (which personally makes me extremely angry) that without our overall contribution these companies simply would not have a gnu/linux distro or a linux kernel on which to make that money].

so, the important question to ask, then, is what *is* good motivation to take action? if, indeed, any action need be taken at all, which is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to reach. not that i personally agree with that, but i can live with it :)

and, to answer that question, i feel it's important to take into account some context and background. many of these things you will already be aware of, but let me put them all together, here.

take a deep breath...

* with the rise of android, Matt Codon shows us an empirical glimpse into the blatant state of GPL violations by OEMs taking place on the Linux Kernel and more: http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/android_tablets/

* many android vendors have lost the right to use linux kernel source code. this article is the most insightful and non-aggrandising i've yet found into the GPL violations situation and its consequences: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/most-android-vendors-lost-their-linu...

* Our Linus declared in april that he was getting fed up with the state of the ARM Linux Kernel. my take on this is that there is an overwhelming amount of "selfishness" creeping into the Linux Kernel development. Our Linus has also recently stated that his passion is actually low-level device driver development. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1114495/focus=112007

* Russell King, the ARM maintainer, has completely lost all motivation to work on the task of merging ARM Linux patches. with the amount of selfishness that has been going on for so many years, i am surprised he's tolerated it this long. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1121096

* I've seen proposed solutions and many many descriptions of the problems caused by the rise of ARM Linux, but none of them look at this from an "overview" perspective, which is that the core of the problem is lack of cooperation and collaboration - precisely counter to the whole purpose of Free Software. here, i hope and believe, is a small insight into that, along with some references and links: http://lkcl.net/linux/linux-selfish.vs.cooperation.html

* an attempt last year to motivate people to get together to buy an early ARM Laptop (the CT-PC89E) which would have been available at the time in mass-volume for $102, the design of which turned out to be sponsored by China Telecom, found more than just GPL violations on the Linux Kernel and u-boot source code. from this chinese factory (who were purely hardware assemblers and middle-men. girls actually) one of the ICs responsible for keyboard and mouse was "black" - no markings; the gnu/linux distribution "mid-linux.com" was *also* a GPL-violating distro which may have links to China's Great Firewalled "Red Flag" Linux; the ODM (who licensed the design from China Telecom) was instructed to offer us nothing more than China Telecom 3G CDMA modems (useless for Europe which needs UMTS); successful reverse-engineering of a linux kernel onto the device encountered evidence of "security" attempts to lock the GPL-violating kernel to the device (which we easily replaced); when my associate presented Debian GNU/Linux running on the device at a meeting with the ODM and told them it had an entirely GPL-compliant and entirely Free GNU/Linux Distro on it, which we wanted to sell across the world, they went very very quiet. lastly, Frans, who created the Debian Installer Port for the 20 people who bought the CT-PC89E samples, is dead. by suicide. i leave these as facts - stated facts - and allow YOU to sift through them and choose which ones to put together, to make your own conclusion(s). they may OR MAY NOT be related.

* the FreedomBox Foundation has a clearly-stated goal, to create the software around small boxes that provide "transition" technology off of non-free and privacy-invasive servers that are all too tempting for corporations and governments to interfere with or peek at... yet there is a clear disconnect and a very wide gap between stating the goal and actually taking any action to go about creating the software, which has clearly not been addressed. The Elephant is in the room, here...

* the UK government was praised by China for looking into possible censorship of the Internet: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/16/0019248/China-Praises-UK-Internet-Cen... http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/08/22/217206/Twitter-To-Meet-With-UK-Gover...

* amongst many other things, the USA continues to take illegal control of DNS zones, destroying the trust and sovereignty of the very fabric of the Internet.

* nokia (who received a $EUR 0.5 billion loan from the European Investment Bank just a few years ago) - our darlings who were using debian as the basis for their smartphone strategy - bought the proprietary and non-community-driven late-GPL-releasing Trolltech, and then recently pulled out of meego _and_ the open-sourcing of Series 60 and out of free software entirely with the famous "burning platform" quote from their CEO.

* HP has very wisely just fire-sold their entire tablet stock in a way that will completely recoup their capital outlay (if it has a resistive touchscreen then the BOM is an estimated $80 and the tablets have sold out in a few days at $98: $18 is just enough wiggle-room for shipping as well as possibly even a modest profit, particularly on the 32gb version @ retail $150. if it's capacitive, the BOM will have an extra appx $30 on top, meaning they'll get all the working capital back... just).

* lastly and perhaps most crucially, it has to be said that this "Peak Oil" thing, along with the "Global Warming" thing, is undeniably taking a grip on the world, which leaves people with a choice to *readily* face it (i.e. be prepared and better yet as well get _other people_ prepared, as a secondary priority), or to face the upcoming situation in a "Crisis" mode, which, if faced *as* a "Crisis" is quite likely to result in your death. people such as joey hess clearly get it: joey now lives entirely off-grid, and yet still has an internet connection. in a forest. i live in a remote area of scotland, now, in a place which has its own well, and we're growing our own food. it's still a work-in-progress.

i could continue with this, and expand it with more examples, but let me make some summary points:

* we're intelligent people, who have achieved a great deal * we're responsible for creating the software that underpins today's computer technology * governments are waltzing in and doing whatever they feel like. * corporations are creating hardware WITHOUT taking us into account, and are grabbing with both hands and returning nothing.

in short: we - intelligent Free Software Developers - are having the piss taken out of us, to put it mildly.

so - i tell you what: i'm going to stop there, for now. i'm going to leave it at that, for people to think, digest the above, and perhaps come up with some answers [i have some ideas, but i want to know most crucially if people are willing to hear them!]. and, to give you an opportunity to think: is this my problem, at all? do i actually care? what _is_ my role? and, if i _do_ care, what could i do if i combine with a number of other people who also care?

i trust that you can see that the scope of the background goes wayyy beyond that which linaro is tasked with, so i hope - i really do - that you feel that this really is something which you care about and can actually feel motivated to consider that _some_ sort of action needs to be taken, beyond the very valuable tasks and roles which you are presently carrying out.

if, on an individual basis, you feel that the answer is "no", it's not my problem, then i can only apologise for having taken up your time, and wish you good luck with the future.

l.

[ Last big cross-post; I'll just post to the cross-distro list in future! ]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 05:11:34PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 07:15:34PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

...

[ARM summit at Plumbers, Thursday 8th September]

UPDATE: we've not had many people confirm interest in this event yet, which is a shame. If you would like to join us for this session, please reply and let me know. If we don't get enough interest by the end of Sunday (28th August), then we'll have to cancel the meeting.

And that seemed to provoke enought interest from people all over, which is good. This event is definitely going on. Let's look forwards to some good discussion. :-)

Cheers,