[Arm-netbook] mali gpu reverse engineering lkcl may ignore

[Mike Leimon]

On 06/23/2017 11:29 AM, Bill Kontos wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 4:27 PM, David Niklas <doark at mail.com> wrote:
>
>> Now can we get back to how to do the reverse engineering itself?
> Someone should suggest Luc to open a monthly patreon-styled donation
> page for working on lima.

If ARM is still as openly hostile as they appear to be towards reverse
engineering of their GPU designs, I don't think that pursuing lima
development is a very good option. I suspect that if development of the
driver resumes, they will probably continue their horrible crusade against
Luc and I don't want to see that happen to anybody.

I think that if we are really trying to play the long game here, then that
money would be better spent working towards the development of an
open GPU design that we can can use in future risc-v SOCs. Perhaps
another option that might be more amenable and rewarding for Luc.
Would be to open a monthly patron-styled donation page not to develop
lima drivers, but instead to work together with people like Jeff Bush
(the main guy developming the Nyuzi GPGPU:
https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor ). To me (and I haven't
read into it much) it seems like, the focus thus far for the Nyuzi project
is only on developing the GPGPU and not so much looking at it from
the point of view of, how would we write a Linux driver for this device.
I think if we focused some money on Luc (driver developer) and the
Nyuzi (hardware developer) developers, then they might be more inspired
to focus their efforts on producing a quality GPGPU and supporting drivers.

Honestly, I think that working together with people who are openly
developing a GPU design and who would probably be quite welcoming
of assistance from Luc would be a much better situation for him than if
he went back to trying to working on the lima driver. Perhaps a company
like si-five ( https://www.sifive.com/ ) or the risc-v organization might
even consider trying to sponsor a collaboration like this as having a good
open GPU implementation would certainly be a boon to them in the future.

Anyhow, that is my two cents.

-Mike