[Arm-netbook] Any ARM SoC has Open-Source access to hardware video decoder ?

[lkcl luke]

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Tsvetan Usunov - OLIMEX Ltd
<usunov at olimex.com> wrote:

> I guess something like this is going to happen with ARM SoCs too, there will
> be company like Freescale or TI which are going to support open source of
> their GPUs

 yes but for that to work there has to be at least _one_ option which
people can use as leverage to say "open up or fuck off".  right now
the total number of viable software (libre) 3D GPU drivers for ARM
SoCs is ***ZERO***.

 ironically the easiest and closest driver to complete and get results
on would be the nvidia tegra 2 driver, because the guy who
reverse-engineered the desktop NVidia GPUs also did a preliminary
analysis of the tegra2 GPU, and has shown that the hardware OpenGL
data structures / memory map is virtually identical.  the only
differences are that the FIFOs are missing (making it *easier* to
program the tegra2 GPU) and he says that the memory-mapped data
structures in the tegra2 are slightly more compact.

 but.. yeah, i'm banking on lima getting there, first, and being useful.

 l.