every team needs a crew.

lardman won't like being sprinkled, his missus might get upset.


for the second time today I typed a long message, I am trying to find the words to fit but couldn't, maybe a new thread would help

Any more progress on this guys?

(FYI - My interest is my pet "wanna port" program - Blender - gotta have descent OpenGL for that. No idea how I'll be able to work it without a keyboard, but I'll figure out something if it gets that far!)

The 3D and DSP drivers for the Pandora were released today from TI. There's a link on the (unofficial) OpenPandora Blog (you need an account with TI to download them).

I know, it's a different processor and a different architecture, but this at least proves that the holdback for the drivers is not TI, as we were at one time led to believe by some.

It's proves nothing of the sort. What it proves is that TI negotiated a different arrangement for the drivers for the OMAP3's SGX with ImagTech than for the OMAP2's MBX.

Other than being unwilling to pay for substandard drivers (the Linux drivers for the MBX in their current state are, apparently, not fit for consumption), or to invest the time and money into improving them, Nokia is definitely not the holdup here.

It doesn't prove anything of the sort; we've already known for a long time that TI was being open with OMAP3, but that doesn't imply that they can or will change licenses on already released products, so it says nothing about whose lawyers are the problem with various OMAP2 drivers.

There are costs associated with going back through and making sure all IP involved belongs to TI, or relicensing under appropriate terms from the actual owners, so it's quite conceivable that they would change their position for future releases (and license IP suitably up front) but not find it worth the cost to redo old stuff.

It's far more interesting the first comment in that blog.

Pfft. Read the article?

Hi, I will use this thread to send updates on one my committed tasks in the maemo.org June sprint:

9.06-14 Plan for the OMAP2 acceleration drivers

There have been some discussions between the Maemo team and TI in the past months, and we seem to be moving to actions now.

This hasn't moved faster for many reasons, one of them being that this is not the most important item in the priority list shared by both companies. Still, I must say I'm impressed about the willingness to come up with a solution for the community shown by both sides. Really remarkable for a project based on 'legacy hardware' (from the platform development point of view of these companies) with zero revenue and actually some additional costs.

The current idea is that TI or an associated partner will provide either an OSS implementation of the driver known to contain some bugs or a closed implementation with probably better performance (although still not 100% commercial quality) or both. It would a one time delivery with no commitment for additional support.

My take in these discussions has been that an OSS driver is always preferrable since it would give to the community the chances to improve it, as opposed to a closed binary. Ther current idea is to try to implement in the OSS driver the fixes that were implemented in the closed one, tidy up the code a bit and make sure all the licensing is correct.

The scenario of community developers signing NDAs has been discarded. Note that both drivers were developed by two different companies that now they need to share their code. It is much easier to deal with this situation by a developer in one of these companies sharing already an NDA.

Everybody is quite busy but they are trying to arrange the time needed to complete the task. No deadlines and not even a commitment, but the optimist in me thinks that we could have some drivers available during the Summer... or perhaps before the Maemo Summit if unknown problems appear.

Does that mean that we'll be able to use clutter and the full Fremantle goodies?

yes, there are costs, but there are costs in NOT doing this, and although these are somewhat intangible they should not be underestimated: they include customer confidence & goodwill. Ask Nvidia why they continue to update drivers for legacy hardware!

Meanwhile there are likely to be tangible benefits: the chips in the N800 aren't unique as there must be variants and derivatives used elsewhere, so a high quality OSS driver will increase the value of the intellectual property embodied in the hardware designs. Ask Atheros and Ralink what they gained from the OSS community!

Anyway, this is good news. It increases the likelihood of me buying my next internet walk-about device from Nokia substantially!