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

[Alexey Eromenko]

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 4:24 PM, lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Surely it is a sad fact, that there are no hardware, that supports
Free Software. No FSF-approved SoCs...

While I agree that 3D is nice, the use-cases for it are limited.
Much more needed is the VPU stuff (hardware video decoder), more than GPU (3D).
Once any SoC will do VPU, it will become so much more useful...

-- 
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"