Ramblings of an unreasonable man, mostly open source video drivers and random open source things.
I had a bzip2ed tarball from 2005 lying around, for which BZip2 threw a CRC error. libv@machine:~$ tar -jxvf ../backup-2005.tar.bz2 backup/ backup/file0.txt backup/file1.pdf backup/file2.bin bzip2: Data integrity error when decompressing. Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout) It is possible that the compressed file(s) have become corrupted. You can use the -tvv option to test integrity of…
Uwe finished soldering the remaining boards, and sent them to me before his vacation started. I added one connector that was still MIA earlier, and also ordered more lcds and tfp401 modules, and then tested the lot. We now have the kit for 4 further test systems. 2 for the fosdem office, 2 for the openfest guys. Here's a picture of them all: Up top, two complete sets, with TFP401 module and LCD,…
This is a picture of a very early test setup for the upcoming video boxes for FOSDEM. The string of hardware in front of the display (my 4:3 projector analogue, attached over hdmi) is: * A status LCD, showing the live capture in the background (with 40% opacity) * An Olimex Lime2 (red board) with our test board on top (green board). * A adafruit TFP401 hdmi to parallel RGB encoder board (blue…
I have just added Sea Island support to flashrom. This puts the R600 style SPI interface behind a pair of indexed registers, but otherwise is highly compatible. While only tested on the first Sea-Island type SPI interface (Bonaire), support should work for everything up to and including Polaris, for a grand total of 240 devices supported today. Bonaire was the introduction of this relocated…
Remember that time when ATI employees tried to re-market their atomBIOS bytecode as scripts? You probably don't, it was a decade ago. It was in the middle of the RadeonHD versus -ati shitstorm. One was the original, written in actual C poking display registers directly, and depending on ATIs atomBIOS as little as practical. The other was the fork, implementing everything the fglrx way, and they…
Soon it will be a decade since we started the RadeonHD driver, where we pushed ATI to a point of no return, got a proper C coded graphics driver and freely accessible documentation out. We all know just what happened to this in the end, and i will make a rather complete write-up spanning multiple blog entries over the following months. But while i was digging out backed up home directories for…
You probably saw this phoronix article which references the log of the #dri-devel channel on freenode . This was an attempt to trash my work on lima and tamil, using my inability to get much in the way of code done, and my unwillingness to throw hackish tamil code over the hedge, against me. Let me take some time to explain some of that from my point of view. Yes, I have lost traction. Yes, i am…
FOSDEM 2015 It was another great FOSDEM this year. Even with their 5-10.000 attendants, the formula of being absolutely free, with limited sponsorship, and while only making small changes each year is an absolute winner. There is just no conference which comes even close to FOSDEM. For those on ICE14 on Friday, the highspeed train from Frankfurt to Brussels south at 14:00, who were so nice to…
So someone leaked 2011 era PowerVR SGX microcode and user space... And now everyone is pissing themselves like a bunch of overexcited puppies... I've been fed links from several sides now, and i cannot believe how short-sighted and irresponsible people are, including a few people who should know better. STOP TELLING PEOPLE TO LOOK AT PROPRIETARY CODE. Having gotten that out of the way, I am…
Anandtech recently went all out on the ARM midgard architecture (Mali T series). This was quite astounding, as ARM MPD tends to be a pretty closed shop. The Anandtech coverage included an in-depth view of the Mali Midgard GPU , a (short) Q&A session with Jem Davies (the head honcho of ARM MPD, ARMs Media Processing Division, the part of ARM that develops the Mali and display and video engines) and…
Like most, I was taken by surprise last weekend, I never expected this to happen, at all. Given that I was the one to poke a rather big hole in the Raspberry Pi image a year and a half ago, and since i have been playing a bit of a role in freeing ARM GPUs these last few years, I thought I'd say a few words on how I see things, and why I said what I said back then, and why I didn't say other…
The FOSDEM organizers have captured more than 16h of video for 22 DevRooms and they are still working hard on getting all of these videos cut and transcoded and put on their site. This is a mammoth task, and some talks in the graphics devroom are still up in the air because of this. Luckily, some people from the sunxi community took the livestream of sunxi related talks, and produced some quick…
When i was still at SuSE, Localhorst would rent a Ford S-Max, and stuff it to the brim with openSuSE kit and swag and drive to FOSDEM. I usually was tolerated on board as well, with my sportsbag full of DevRoom kit , provided i sang along to the radio, and didn't mention burger-king. Everyone at SuSE either made their own arrangements, or everyone was stuck on a flight from Nuremberg to Brussels…
Now that my body is well on its road to recovery, it's time to talk about the great success that FOSDEM was, once again. We had a really nice devroom and pretty good crowds, but the most amazing thing was the recordings and the livestream. The FOSDEM organizers really outdid themselves there. After the initial announcement of the graphics devroom went out, Martin Peres contacted me and we talked…
Yes, there is going to be another exciting DevRoom about graphics on the upcoming FOSDEM . It's not called the X.org DevRoom this time round, but a hopefully more general Graphics DevRoom. As was the case with the X.org DevRooms before, anything related to graphics drivers and windowing systems goes. While the new name should make it clearer that this DevRoom is about more than just X, it also…
Only a few days ago did I write about how open source software is not about "code or design or doing The Right Thing". "Open source software is about power, politics, corporate affiliation, and loads and loads of noise." I would like to thank Intel for so succinctly underlining that now with their current action . Before I go any further, this seems to not be Chris Wilsons decision or his…
es2gears! Progress is slow but steady on the lima mesa driver, mostly because I am not giving lima as much time as I should. I now have working attributes, uniforms, vertex buffers and even some state is being set correctly. Enough to run es2gears. Here is the video on youtube , there is an older capture with a rotating smoothed cube as well . This lima mesa driver uses the old-school (but…
I just pushed updated limare code and a fix to ioquake3 . In almost 160 patches, loads of things change: clean FOSDEM code supporting Q3A timedemo on a limare ioquake3. support for r3p2 kernel and binary userspace as found on the odroid-x series. multiple PP support, allowing for the full power of the mali 400MP4 to be used. fully threaded job handling, so new frames can be set up while the first…
The combination of limare and open-gpu-tools can now run Quake 3 Arena timedemo without depending on the binary driver for the shader compiler! Connor Abbott has been being his amazing (16y old!) self again in the weeks after his talk at FOSDEM , and he pushed his compiler work in his open-gpu-tools tree to be able to handle basic vertex shaders. Remember that our vertex shader is a rather insane…
Quake 3 Arena code. I pushed out the Quake 3 Arena code used for demoing limare and for benchmarking. You can build it on your linux-sunxi with make ARCH=arm or, for the limare version (which will not build without the matching limare driver, which i haven't pushed out yet :)) make ARCH=arm USE_LIMARE=1 for the GLESv2 version (with the broken lamps due to missing alphatest): make ARCH=arm…
At FOSDEM , I had a mainline talk about "Open ARM GPU Drivers" , going over all the projects and GPUs, talking about the developers doing the hard reverse engineering work and the progress that they have made so far. I will write up a blog entry summarizing this talk soon, but for now i will just talk about the Lima demo i showed at the end of the talk. Let me get straight to the main point before…
FOSDEM was awesome this year. We had an overbooked schedule for our DevRoom, we inaugurated the beautiful and fantastic K building, and i got to present the lima driver. First off, i would like to thank the FOSDEM organizers and the ULB. The already unique event that is FOSDEM just keeps getting better and better. Pascal & friends: congratulations, like every year, you've outdone yourselves.…
Yes! The board has decided! XDC comes to Nuremberg! For 2012 we (Egbert Eich, Professor Hopf, and I) will be hosting the annual X conference in Nuremberg! Egbert will try to get the main SuSE conference room, or, failing that, Matthias will try to get us a university aula, so the venue itself will work itself out beautifully in one way or another. Then... Nuremberg is one of those places which is…
(Bicycle-) Wheel building is an art. An art perfectly suited for a geek; it requires technical insight, knowledge, feeling and some experience. For those interested, here are some tips and pointers from my own experience. 1) Buy "Professional guide to Wheel Building" by Roger Musson , it is going to be the best 9GBP you have spent in a long long while. [HINT1] 2) Read it, twice! 3) Buy the rims…
In order to get easier access to Nokia things, and to boost security (as in, encrypt stuff, for a change), I've been reinstalling my trusted hp 6715b. Most nokians use ubuntu, so i went for 10.4LTS. I already severely disliked the way in which you have no installation options to chose from. You get the grandmother version every time, no "i have a clue, let me decide what i want to do, myself"…