Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-23 Thread Matthew Garrett
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:18:21AM -0600, Matt Sealey wrote:
 Ownership of the code is dependent on who licensed it. I do not think
 Linaro need be so concerned over opensourcing or reimplementing
 drivers. The fact that the kernel driver is open source as it is, and
 this is by far the most important part. The userspace library is
 closed because it is proprietary; and I think it is well outside
 Linaro's remit to lobby for opensourcing of proprietary code simply to
 meet an esoteric and needless demand for source code access (as it
 stands, you can get source code access by signing the usual plethora
 of NDAs with the appropriate vendor, as Genesi has done). It is my
 understanding that Freescale/AMD and Qualcomm maintain seperate forks
 of the driver and do not cooperate on development, and in any case,
 Linaro does not include Qualcomm anyway, therefore it is also to my
 understanding that this discussion is also beyond Linaro's remit.

Given that upstream policy is to refuse DRM components unless there's an 
open userspace consumer of the interface, whether or not this 
conversation has any purpose is entirely down to whether Linaro's kernel 
policy is to limit itself to upstreamable code or not. If Linaro's 
reference kernel is intended to include nothing but code that's on track 
to become mainline then asking whether there's any way these drivers can 
be merged is a useful question. If Linaro's reference kernel is intended 
to include whatever's necessary to get hardware working, 
upstream-suitable or otherwise, then there's not much point in worrying 
about it.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-23 Thread Alan Cox
 The GPLv2 is written such that the if you're interfacing the kernel
 or compiler you don't need to opensource that bit with your app

I would suggest you re-read the license. It says nothing of the sort.
Indeed the gcc compiler licensing for the compiler support library is
actually rather carefully done for this reason.

 You may think it's a horrible idea, and from a technical perspective
 it is, but from a legal perspective.. it's not a problem.

I would suggest you re-read the detail on derivative works, from a legal
not a computer science point of view. You may want to read up on the
history of the dispute between Next (the computing not the clothing firm)
and the FSF with regards to the Objective C compiler.

Note also btw that the possibility of accidentally including general user
space was a concern which is why there is a rider with the kernel COPYING
file - for the standard syscall interfaces only. There is a difference
between a derivative work and merely using an interface and there are
lots of ways works can be derivative or not that usually surprise people
who think in models around code. The fact these can work in weird and
wonderous ways is one reason for that rider.

 grounds, and policy grounds. There is no legal issue here. It is not

That is a point only a court of law can decide. It's something I do spend
time discussing with lawyers and I have to say not one of them considers
there to be no legal issue. The actual boundary for such things is
extremely grey and ill defined in software, although there is a lot more
caselaw in comparable other areas (anthologies and compilations versus
for example music as film scores, or combining two pieces of music to
make one tune)

 concept now... what's the point? It'll never get into mainline.

Unless it is open sourced - ditto the various other things with the same
problem - including things like the Intel PSB driver.

Alan
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-23 Thread Alan Cox
  way to behave.   The best way to get companies to change their behaviour is 
 to find them and support them.  Making threatening GPL noises in email does 
 not help them in any way.

I would disagree based on years of history.

The best way to get a company to change behaviour is for a situation to
occur in which it is in their own hardcore capitalist self interest to
change.

In my experience open source usually mirrors standards in this. The
leading vendors refuse to take part, the smaller vendors see the
opportunity - often working together - and the bigger vendor eithers gets
its backside kicked or does a sharp turn in the right direction.

That's the story of email, of the web, and is occuring currently in
telephony and other areas.

It's also why folks like Dell deserve a lot more credit than they get for
the success of Linux.

If its not commercially sensible it doesn't matter what the licensing
says. They are corporations not charities, if it's not economically
viable for them to manage it all themselves including new driver
releases, legal risk, all their own review and keeping up with DRI then
they have to decide which way to go - some go the hit and run approach
('not got kernel X then sorry but not our problem'), some do the work to
support it release by release but don't go GPL (eg Nvidia), some open up,
others just walk away.

Alan
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-23 Thread David Rusling
Alan,
I still stand by my assertion that educating companies as to the 
realities and philosophies of open source is better than threatening them.   
Your analogy of  open source as a standard, a practical de facto standard 
written in a programming language is a good one.Forking code (by never 
upstreaming it) tends not to be sustainable (although some companies still 
try).Proprietary code exists for all sorts of reasons, often a bogus belief 
in an intrinsic value.Graphics, in particular, is a very litigious world 
and also, the biggest cause of proprietary code, surely some link?

Back to the plot.   Linaro is trying to help here, both in reducing 
non-optimal code forking and in helping its members work better with the open 
source communities.   As I said in my earlier mail, this will take time.   That 
said, I've seen enormous shifts within the ARM partnership already this year 
and look forward to more next year.

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to one and all.
Dave

ps nice to see that you keep your old email address.Are you still in Wales?

On 23 Dec 2010, at 17:17, Alan Cox wrote:

 way to behave.   The best way to get companies to change their behaviour is 
 to find them and support them.  Making threatening GPL noises in email does 
 not help them in any way.
 
 I would disagree based on years of history.
 
 The best way to get a company to change behaviour is for a situation to
 occur in which it is in their own hardcore capitalist self interest to
 change.
 
 In my experience open source usually mirrors standards in this. The
 leading vendors refuse to take part, the smaller vendors see the
 opportunity - often working together - and the bigger vendor eithers gets
 its backside kicked or does a sharp turn in the right direction.
 
 That's the story of email, of the web, and is occuring currently in
 telephony and other areas.
 
 It's also why folks like Dell deserve a lot more credit than they get for
 the success of Linux.
 
 If its not commercially sensible it doesn't matter what the licensing
 says. They are corporations not charities, if it's not economically
 viable for them to manage it all themselves including new driver
 releases, legal risk, all their own review and keeping up with DRI then
 they have to decide which way to go - some go the hit and run approach
 ('not got kernel X then sorry but not our problem'), some do the work to
 support it release by release but don't go GPL (eg Nvidia), some open up,
 others just walk away.
 
 Alan

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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Konstantinos Margaritis
On 22 December 2010 09:51, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 Okay I hereby refrain from legal comments.

 In any case, this code has passed legal at Freescale and AMD *AND*
 Qualcomm. It would not be GPL if it has not been vetted (and it took
 them a year to get to this point).

It appears that this discussion ended up on phoronix.com [1], with an
air of hostility towards Genesi and Matt for no good reason.

I don't know whose idea was that, but it's certainly of very bad taste
and helps very little to the discussion. Matt poses real questions and
issues we -as a company producing ARM products- face all the time.
Admittedly the technical reasons for not including the kernel-space
driver into mainline presented by Dave Airlie are correct and very
down-to-earth. But IMHO, *this* should be the starting point to
continue the discussion, instead of immediately rejecting this driver.
Is there *any* way that problem posed by Dave could be solved, perhaps
by throwing the ball to the ARM vendor companies to provide just a
small extra part of the code needed to do API checks and therefore
ensuring the kernel guys CAN actually do their work as they like?

As for the philosophical problems, well, I'm sure everyone here
understands that the situation of ARM graphics in the kernel is in no
way comparable to Intel or Nvidia/ATI chipsets, they had totally
different starting points. ARM came from the embedded market where it
thrived for many years with the exact same licensing rules that we all
would like to abolish in just a few months, where at the same time we
swallowed the fact that it took Intel and ATI/AMD - forget nvidia,
nv-obfuscated driver IN the kernel for YEARS? really? - many years to
accept mainline opensource development. And even Intel with all their
experience made a complete mess of things using the latest cpus.

I *really* do appreciate Linaro and the effort from ARM and the
relevant vendors towards open source enablement, and Genesi has proven
that by donating ~50 ARM based netbooks and smarttops to Linaro
developers at lin...@uds -and around ~40 units to other projects
including Debian and Gentoo -and we intend to give more in the future.
We know the process and how it works, just as well as everyone here
does actually. But we also have to be pragmatic. An ARM based
solution/product with no long-term support from the kernel side will
find it very hard to survive indeed. I strongly believe that, half a
solution is better than no solution, and it can also serve a purpose
until a proper full solution appears. It also does show a leap of good
faith from the FOSS side, and one which ARM companies will have to
follow soon.

So, if by chance anyone really expects ARM licensees to do 180 degrees
change in philosophy overnight, I obviously cannot speak for them, but
IMHO, that is not bound to happen. It will probably happen in a few
years but only by discussion and collaboration, seriously not by
dealing with absolutes. Denying even the smallest step backwards from
the side of the FOSS community is not a victory, it's a downright
failure of the community side to actively support and push ARM -based
devices as an alternative Linux desktop and portable solutions
(netbook etc).

My 2c.

Konstantinos

[1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=ODk0NA
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread David Rusling
Konstantinos,
thanks, I agree with your thoughts.   My approach has been to accept 
small steps in the right direction and encourage reasoned discussion.   I also 
think that Linaro's main function is as a place where all the moving parts can 
collaborate.Right now, the GPU 'problem' is that of getting both open 
source and proprietary pieces of the BSPs to work really well together in 
products.   That's really the focus of the Graphics WGs and the partner landing 
teams.   This is a heavy lifting engineering job, and it will take time, but 
everyone is willing and hopeful of good results.Doing this will also help 
us have a reasoned discussion about where the open source and proprietary 
boundaries make sense.

Now for a bit of a rant.   Personally, I have a deep and abiding 
respect for open source (for me, it's the key social invention of the internet 
age), however I also recognise that it would not exist without companies using 
open source as part of their products.Let's face it, an awful lot of open 
source engineers are getting their mortgages paid by companies that make use of 
open source. No company invests in open source for philanthropic reasons; 
they understand that it is necessary for their businesses.The tricky 
problem is always in how ethical a company's usage is (and I use the word 
'ethical' deliberately because this is wider than mere legal words smithing); 
whenever I give talks on GPL, I emphasise both the moral as well as the legal 
duties.In my experience, most companies struggle to understand open source 
when they first start to interact with it.   It usually takes some open source 
zealots within the company to persuade their management of the right 
 way to behave.   The best way to get companies to change their behaviour is to 
find them and support them.  Making threatening GPL noises in email does not 
help them in any way.

Dave


David Rusling, CTO
http://www.linaro.org

Linaro
Lockton House
Clarendon Rd
Cambridge
CB2 8FH




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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Nicolas Pitre
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, David Rusling wrote:

   Now for a bit of a rant.  Personally, I have a deep and abiding 
 respect for open source (for me, it's the key social invention of the 
 internet age), however I also recognise that it would not exist 
 without companies using open source as part of their products.  Let's 
 face it, an awful lot of open source engineers are getting their 
 mortgages paid by companies that make use of open source.

I cannot be in full agreement with the above statement.  I think the 
reality is way more nuanced than that.

The truth of the matter is that Open Source came into existence without 
and despite involvement from the corporate world.  And the very reason 
it started to attract interest from the corporate world is because of 
Open Source's superior quality and performance at a lower cost.  Open 
Source would have existed even without companies using it as you would 
still have those Open Source activists using it themselves in your 
product, even without the help of the corporate money. The company 
involvement in Open Source did indeed accelerate its development by 
paying many people to work on it full time.  But Open Source would still 
be there and still be in good shape even if corporate involvement didn't 
happen, just like it was before.

And this superior quality and performance characteristics of Open Source 
are not a coincidence.  They are the first motives in a world which is 
not driven by monetary profits, unlike most if not all the proprietary 
alternatives.  The people leading Open Source are driven by the 
technical excellence of their work and the recognition they get from 
their peers.  Money is a far secondary motive, and in this age you can 
choose between different sources of sufficient money not to have to 
worry about it anymore and compromise too much on your primary motives 
when you already have a track record in this Open Source world.

So to say that the corporate world might need to consider Open Source to 
be competitive and survive, but the reverse is not true i.e. Open Source 
doesn't _require_ the corporate world to survive.

 No company invests in open source for philanthropic reasons; they 
 understand that it is necessary for their businesses.  The tricky 
 problem is always in how ethical a company's usage is (and I use the 
 word 'ethical' deliberately because this is wider than mere legal 
 words smithing); whenever I give talks on GPL, I emphasise both the 
 moral as well as the legal duties.  In my experience, most companies 
 struggle to understand open source when they first start to interact 
 with it.  It usually takes some open source zealots within the company 
 to persuade their management of the right way to behave.  The best way 
 to get companies to change their behaviour is to find them and support 
 them.  Making threatening GPL noises in email does not help them in 
 any way.

Here I'm more in agreement with you.  However this is again not the full 
picture.

Ethical or not, the first motive of a company is to make profits.  If 
that was easy to get away with it, all that companies would do is simply 
to grab this body of source code for themselves and never contribute 
back. And a sizable number of companies, even some sizable companies, 
are doing just that.  While this isn't going to kill Open Source, this 
certainly makes it weaker because this is contrary to that very first 
principle that made Open Source a success in the first place.  
Companies doing that are after the immediate monetary profit and not the 
technical excellence and performances.

But even when leaving the ethical aspect aside, it is not going to be 
profitable for companies in the long term to grab Open Source results 
and move it back to the legacy proprietary model.  Doing that will be to 
their disadvantage when some other companies come along to compete on 
the market using Open Source to its fullest technical excellence and 
performance potential.  Fortunately, a sizable number of companies, even 
sizable ones, did understand that already.

But... while some companies are struggling to understand how to interact 
with Open Source, the Open Source world still dash ahead without much 
concerns for corporate profits.  As said above, those strange Open 
Source animals are motivated by the technical excellence of their work, 
and they're going to fight on that front against anything that might 
affect or prevent that goal.  This is again why Open Source has always 
progressed even despite initial attempts to kill it from some 
corporations.  So far, Linux has always been immune to monetary forces, 
whether those forces were against it or not. So it is fair to say that 
Open Source survival depends primarily on its technical advantages above 
anything else.

In conclusion: don't get surprised if technically inferior propositions, 
such as proprietary 3D libraries coupled with kernel-side interfaces, 
are met with strong or even vehement 

Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Nicolas Pitre
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Tom Gall wrote:

 The very important part of this whole discussion is getting arm Linux and it's
 3d driver situation so it TOO is the best.
 
 Right now it's not and pointing to other elements of the system and saying
 it's great is besides the point.

My whole point, if I may resume my conclusion to a few words, is that 
most Open Source folks don't care if you can't open your code for 
whatever reasons.  That won't encourage them to compromise on their 
fundamental principle.  It's up to those companies to balance the cost 
of maintaining their ad hoc proprietary stuff themselves vs the cost of 
opening up their code so it can be merged upstream.

 This discussion is good, but for it to have a positive outcome, we need to
 turn the direction back to how we get to the end goal
 for arm 3D graphics.

Absolutely!

 It's not probably going to happen at once with one patch that does 
 what everyone wants. I think it's going to take graduated steps and 
 some compromises.

Yes.  However, as I said, those compromises may not come on the 
technical aspects of the kernel interfaces.  Just like it is unlikely 
for companies to ever compromise on their profits.  Any compromise 
touching any of those fundamental aspects for their respective parties 
is bound to always fail.

In other words, let's save ourselves some energy and give up on the idea 
that a kernel shim only for a binary only user space library is going to 
ever be accepted in mainline.  This simply will never happen, period.


Nicolas
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Jerome Glisse
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 6:02 AM, Konstantinos Margaritis
mar...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 On 22 December 2010 09:51, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 Okay I hereby refrain from legal comments.

 In any case, this code has passed legal at Freescale and AMD *AND*
 Qualcomm. It would not be GPL if it has not been vetted (and it took
 them a year to get to this point).

 It appears that this discussion ended up on phoronix.com [1], with an
 air of hostility towards Genesi and Matt for no good reason.

 I don't know whose idea was that, but it's certainly of very bad taste
 and helps very little to the discussion. Matt poses real questions and
 issues we -as a company producing ARM products- face all the time.
 Admittedly the technical reasons for not including the kernel-space
 driver into mainline presented by Dave Airlie are correct and very
 down-to-earth. But IMHO, *this* should be the starting point to
 continue the discussion, instead of immediately rejecting this driver.
 Is there *any* way that problem posed by Dave could be solved, perhaps
 by throwing the ball to the ARM vendor companies to provide just a
 small extra part of the code needed to do API checks and therefore
 ensuring the kernel guys CAN actually do their work as they like?

It's not enough to provide a toy program/library that just call into
the new kernel API, you really need to provide a full open source use
case that does achieve somethings using the new kernel API you are
introducing. It's the only way we can possibly evaluate the new API.

Open source GPU kernel API are a pain to design and i can tell you
that if i had liberty to change them i would do that a lot until
finding the best one (nouveau is in happy situation here and they are
more than right to wait until they are completely satisfied with the
API before freezing it).

 As for the philosophical problems, well, I'm sure everyone here
 understands that the situation of ARM graphics in the kernel is in no
 way comparable to Intel or Nvidia/ATI chipsets, they had totally
 different starting points. ARM came from the embedded market where it
 thrived for many years with the exact same licensing rules that we all
 would like to abolish in just a few months, where at the same time we
 swallowed the fact that it took Intel and ATI/AMD - forget nvidia,
 nv-obfuscated driver IN the kernel for YEARS? really? - many years to
 accept mainline opensource development. And even Intel with all their
 experience made a complete mess of things using the latest cpus.

No body is saying AMD or Intel were fast to jump into open source,
doesn't mean that ARM ecosystem can't do it faster than AMD or Intel
did.

 I *really* do appreciate Linaro and the effort from ARM and the
 relevant vendors towards open source enablement, and Genesi has proven
 that by donating ~50 ARM based netbooks and smarttops to Linaro
 developers at lin...@uds -and around ~40 units to other projects
 including Debian and Gentoo -and we intend to give more in the future.
 We know the process and how it works, just as well as everyone here
 does actually. But we also have to be pragmatic. An ARM based
 solution/product with no long-term support from the kernel side will
 find it very hard to survive indeed. I strongly believe that, half a
 solution is better than no solution, and it can also serve a purpose
 until a proper full solution appears. It also does show a leap of good
 faith from the FOSS side, and one which ARM companies will have to
 follow soon.

 So, if by chance anyone really expects ARM licensees to do 180 degrees
 change in philosophy overnight, I obviously cannot speak for them, but
 IMHO, that is not bound to happen. It will probably happen in a few
 years but only by discussion and collaboration, seriously not by
 dealing with absolutes. Denying even the smallest step backwards from
 the side of the FOSS community is not a victory, it's a downright
 failure of the community side to actively support and push ARM -based
 devices as an alternative Linux desktop and portable solutions
 (netbook etc).

 My 2c.


Cheers,
Jerome Glisse
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski

So to say that the corporate world might need to consider Open Source to
be competitive and survive, but the reverse is not true i.e. Open Source
doesn't _require_ the corporate world to survive.


i agree with it fully, and to support this claim i want to remind the
simple rule of capital accumulation. Open Source community
_already_ accumulated enough _capital_ in form of algorithms, 
implementations, social relations, experience, documentation and

augmentation with education system .

it can survive just fine without corporate world, while
logical relationship with organisations whole main purpose of existence
is creating profit, is to gain profit from such relationship itself.
otherwise it would be bit like Faust would just give his soul away 
completely free... and everyone knows it's not the point while dealing 
with devil.


i also understand reluctance of some people about such deals -
despite huge gains , one can loose very important things,
and end up escaping from small print obligations.
sometimes it is better to make slower, but steady progress instead.

greetings.
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Konstantinos Margaritis
On 22 December 2010 20:39, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski
curi...@bwv190.internetdsl.tpnet.pl wrote:
 So to say that the corporate world might need to consider Open Source to
 be competitive and survive, but the reverse is not true i.e. Open Source
 doesn't _require_ the corporate world to survive.

 i agree with it fully, and to support this claim i want to remind the
 simple rule of capital accumulation. Open Source community
 _already_ accumulated enough _capital_ in form of algorithms,
 implementations, social relations, experience, documentation and
 augmentation with education system .

I'm sorry you've got it all wrong. Survive? Yes, certainly. Actually
thrive and make a difference in the world without the corporate world?
Definitely not. If you only care about the former that's fine, but
have no illusion that we would even be having this discussion here
were it not for the corporate world caring about Linux on ARM.

Konstantinos
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Nicolas Pitre
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:

 On 22 December 2010 20:39, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski
 curi...@bwv190.internetdsl.tpnet.pl wrote:
  So to say that the corporate world might need to consider Open Source to
  be competitive and survive, but the reverse is not true i.e. Open Source
  doesn't _require_ the corporate world to survive.
 
  i agree with it fully, and to support this claim i want to remind the
  simple rule of capital accumulation. Open Source community
  _already_ accumulated enough _capital_ in form of algorithms,
  implementations, social relations, experience, documentation and
  augmentation with education system .
 
 I'm sorry you've got it all wrong. Survive? Yes, certainly. Actually
 thrive and make a difference in the world without the corporate world?
 Definitely not. If you only care about the former that's fine, but
 have no illusion that we would even be having this discussion here
 were it not for the corporate world caring about Linux on ARM.

Maybe.  But corporations so far have played by the Open Source rules to 
make ARM Linux what it is.  There was mutual benefits in that and ARM 
Linux did grew faster.

Having accommodations in the kernel for proprietary drivers is not a 
mutual benefit anymore.  That might be hard to understand from your 
point of view, but the incentives in the Open Source communities aren't 
based on commercial results.


Nicolas
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Konstantinos Margaritis
On 22 December 2010 21:22, Nicolas Pitre nicolas.pi...@linaro.org wrote:
 Having accommodations in the kernel for proprietary drivers is not a
 mutual benefit anymore.  That might be hard to understand from your
 point of view, but the incentives in the Open Source communities aren't
 based on commercial results.

DISCLAIMER: I'm also a Debian developer -have been since 1999 with a
small 2y break- so I _do_ know the F/OSS community point of view. My
goals have been always in promoting open source and free software
solutions when and when not available. Right now open source solutions
are _not_ available, and that is the problem.

I haven't reversed engineered any driver so I can't claim of knowledge in this
matter. However I've been following closely other such projects like nouveau
and it took them a _long_ time to get to this point here -which may be usable
for many people, but it's not even at a beta state according to the Nouveau
developers. Even if we assume the fact that 10 times more ARM F/OSS
developers gather to reverse engineer the binary blobs, how long do you think
it would take until a beta driver appears? 1 year? 2 years? And what will happen
in the meantime?

I'm not advocating that closed source drivers be included in the
kernel, but IMHO,
having an open kernel-space driver would also help the reverse engineering
process at the same time as allowing common users as well as developers to
use and test any 3D applications -don't forget that 3D problems don't
end at the driver,
rather the opposite.

Konstantinos
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Dave Airlie

 I'm not advocating that closed source drivers be included in the
 kernel, but IMHO,
 having an open kernel-space driver would also help the reverse engineering
 process at the same time as allowing common users as well as developers to
 use and test any 3D applications -don't forget that 3D problems don't
 end at the driver,
 rather the opposite.

Again thats a short-term view. So we spend the effort to clean up the open
kernel code, but the vendors want to keep the interface to userspace the
same so the binary modules can keep functioning? How do we clean up
insanities in the interfaces? How do we optimise the stack going forward?

Having the code in mainline won't help anyone who is any good at
reverse engineering.

Dave.
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski

On 22 December 2010 20:39, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski
curi...@bwv190.internetdsl.tpnet.pl wrote:

So to say that the corporate world might need to consider Open Source to
be competitive and survive, but the reverse is not true i.e. Open Source
doesn't _require_ the corporate world to survive.


i agree with it fully, and to support this claim i want to remind the
simple rule of capital accumulation. Open Source community
_already_ accumulated enough _capital_ in form of algorithms,
implementations, social relations, experience, documentation and
augmentation with education system .


I'm sorry you've got it all wrong. Survive? Yes, certainly. Actually
thrive and make a difference in the world without the corporate world?
Definitely not. If you only care about the former that's fine, but
have no illusion that we would even be having this discussion here
were it not for the corporate world caring about Linux on ARM.


survive, and serve. despite corporate entities, opensource projects
do not just cease to exist once markets cut the profit down.
this is where corporations loose big time in comparison to opensource.

thrive? come on, discussion starts about small, insignificant toys, and
i repeat - insignificant toys. talking big about '3d in linux'
as any priority sounds funny in world in which 99% of the tcp/ip routing 
is performed by opensource-based solutions, at both enterprise , and
'home' scale. while opensource display system has enough proprietary 
alternatives to choose from at low cost, point of developing it lies

far beyond just cutting few pennies for ... toys. this can be done
without opensource at all.

talking about opensource unable to survive without care of corporate world 
is also funny. current opensource politics allowed such growth thanx to

proper politics when it came to dealing with corporate world. without
opensource certain solutions would never propagate and become 
cost-effective to gain enough markets. so profit opensource gained from it

is fair-earned, and comes from market itself, not from corporate world
attitude. in other words - if certain corporations would not partake 
certain attitude, it would be done by other ones, or certain products 
would just never existed.


still _opensource_ would be same good as before, 
as notice development of certain algorithms and code was conducted in 
parallel, and also sponsored by university environments for solely 
research and educational purposes (to exclude any opensource-ideology 
driven motives) .


my 2 eurocents ;)
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski

it would take until a beta driver appears? 1 year? 2 years? And what will happen
in the meantime?


plainly.some other company will take over the market, and sell products 
with open drivers available.

in meantime arm devices can still be used for i.e. dataloggers, especially
without linux support their market price drops significantly.

i really see no big deal here. it happened before with nvidia -
don't you recall how much their hardware lost in it's value ?
upgraded cards were given-away as buggy and unsupported in linux,
and had very short-life in 2nd hand market.
compare it to i.e. SGI machines which are still circulating and are 
valued, even though their opensource support is actually not so brilliant, 
and hardware performance even worse...


nowadays companies like ARM are again fishing in the same market - people 
who once invested big bucks in nvidia, are now thinking twice.
and it's not really related with opensource - notice how many unsatisfied 
customers turned away from _proprietary_ solutions , tired with messy 
service packs, remote exploits, long-uncorrected bugs, and dropping of 
support for whole OS solutions, leaving users with expensive support 
options and unstable systems behind.


i think if new ARM/freescale products will not have decent opensource 
support now, they will not only loose opensource market, but will not get 
the profit from proprietary market basing on previous 'success' of 
similiar solutions due fact users simply learnt their lesson.



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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Xavier Bestel
Le mercredi 22 décembre 2010 à 15:29 -0500, Nicolas Pitre a écrit :
 It is 
 not economically viable for the Open Source community to accommodate 
 proprietary drivers, irrespective of how loud you might advocate for 
 that.

I think you can remove the word economically from your sentence (or
replace it with e.g. technically), and it's all the more true.

Xav

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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-22 Thread Nicolas Pitre
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Xavier Bestel wrote:

 Le mercredi 22 décembre 2010 à 15:29 -0500, Nicolas Pitre a écrit :
  It is 
  not economically viable for the Open Source community to accommodate 
  proprietary drivers, irrespective of how loud you might advocate for 
  that.
 
 I think you can remove the word economically from your sentence (or
 replace it with e.g. technically), and it's all the more true.

I used that word on purpose. Economic principles do exist in the Open 
Source world too.  It is just not based on monetary profits.


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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Arnd Bergmann
On Tuesday 21 December 2010 03:17:40 Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
 On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Alan Cox wrote:
 
  My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
  single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
  without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.
 
  As a copyright holder on the kernel I'll also remind the people concerned
  that the definition of a derivative work is a legal not a technical one
  and if the kernel and user space cannot be used except together and one
  half depends on GPL elements I hope your lawyers have reviewed it
  carefully. I have never given anyone permission to link my GPL kernel
  contributions with anything but GPL code, modular or otherwise, except
  according to the derivative work rules laid down by the GPL (and indeed
  by the boundaries placed on copyright law).
 
 but it can be circumvented by writing GPL driver which will act as 'glue 
 logic' inbetween userspace driver and which will work in kernel space?
 
 technically then driver would be GPL, except it's closed parts which will 
 be ran in userspace... or can you forbid usage of certain closed userspace 
 components with kernel?

Anyone can try shipping this and risk a lawsuit, and all copyright holders
of the kernel can try suing people that distribute such code. Most sensible
people stay out of both the shipping questionable code and the suing part,
but apparently the entire mobile phone industry is already doing both, so
we can just wait and see if anyone has deep enough pockets to bring this
up in court first ;-).

The only thing that is currently being enforced is that no interfaces enter
the mainline kernel that rely on closed source user space. Once something
is merged in mainline, you are generally free to write code under any
license you want against that interface.

Arnd
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Matt Sealey
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Tuesday 21 December 2010 03:17:40 Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
 On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Alan Cox wrote:

  My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
  single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
  without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.
 
  As a copyright holder on the kernel I'll also remind the people concerned
  that the definition of a derivative work is a legal not a technical one
  and if the kernel and user space cannot be used except together and one
  half depends on GPL elements I hope your lawyers have reviewed it
  carefully. I have never given anyone permission to link my GPL kernel
  contributions with anything but GPL code, modular or otherwise, except
  according to the derivative work rules laid down by the GPL (and indeed
  by the boundaries placed on copyright law).

 but it can be circumvented by writing GPL driver which will act as 'glue
 logic' inbetween userspace driver and which will work in kernel space?

 technically then driver would be GPL, except it's closed parts which will
 be ran in userspace... or can you forbid usage of certain closed userspace
 components with kernel?

 Anyone can try shipping this and risk a lawsuit, and all copyright holders
 of the kernel can try suing people that distribute such code. Most sensible
 people stay out of both the shipping questionable code and the suing part,
 but apparently the entire mobile phone industry is already doing both, so
 we can just wait and see if anyone has deep enough pockets to bring this
 up in court first ;-).

Nobody will because it is unenforcable.

The GPLv2 is written such that the if you're interfacing the kernel
or compiler you don't need to opensource that bit with your app
clause can actually be manipulated to basically disavow closed source
code from having to be published as open source if it interfaces with
the standard operating system components. It is meant to protect
software developers from having to bundle a gigabyte of kernel and
compiler code with their 100 line app that uses an ioctl, but legally
it works against  the GPL in this way. It is what means AMD, nVidia,
Intel (hi Alan), and others can produce binary code and binary
executables that run on opensource kernels (wireless regulatory daemon
in the early days) basically with impunity.

You may think it's a horrible idea, and from a technical perspective
it is, but from a legal perspective.. it's not a problem.

 The only thing that is currently being enforced is that no interfaces enter
 the mainline kernel that rely on closed source user space. Once something
 is merged in mainline, you are generally free to write code under any
 license you want against that interface.

Yes, this is basically it: the problem here is that Alan is
stipulating that as a copyright holder in the kernel he has a big
problem with merging the code, but in fact as the merge proposal only
includes GPL code, nobody has a leg to stand on except on moral
grounds, and policy grounds. There is no legal issue here. It is not
going into mainline, fair enough. What I am curious about is why did
Linaro push it to dri-devel in the first place? I think the concept of
taking a driver from a BSP and then just FLINGING it at mainline is
not responsible in the first place. Isn't it enough to go into the
Linaro tree, discretely and quietly? Then we can have a discussion
about what to do about it within Linaro.

Frankly, this discussion (besides the sidetrack to the non-existant
legal issues) did pop up a major problem in the possibility of
unifying the IPU, dual GPU and other graphics subsystem frameworks on
the i.MX processor line, and potentially others too (TI's LCDC and PVR
graphics) in that DRM/DRI security policy will forbid them (in the
form of David Arlie complaining) from sharing the same memory area,
MMUs on or off. This actually means all 2D, 2D acceleration, 3D
acceleration and DMA between the units requires bounce buffers and
some overly complicated memory copying between memory areas for them
to interoperate. I think TI hit this problem trying to get a texture
from the DSP to the GPU to render it to a texture and came up with an
awful (closed source :) method of ioctls and so on to achieve it. I
had an idea to solve it using DRM and GEM but it's been shot down in
concept now... what's the point? It'll never get into mainline.

-- 
Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com
Product Development Analyst, Genesi USA, Inc.
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Arnd Bergmann
On Tuesday 21 December 2010 18:29:56 Matt Sealey wrote:

  The only thing that is currently being enforced is that no interfaces enter
  the mainline kernel that rely on closed source user space. Once something
  is merged in mainline, you are generally free to write code under any
  license you want against that interface.
 
 Yes, this is basically it: the problem here is that Alan is
 stipulating that as a copyright holder in the kernel he has a big
 problem with merging the code, but in fact as the merge proposal only
 includes GPL code, nobody has a leg to stand on except on moral
 grounds, and policy grounds. There is no legal issue here. It is not
 going into mainline, fair enough. What I am curious about is why did
 Linaro push it to dri-devel in the first place? I think the concept of
 taking a driver from a BSP and then just FLINGING it at mainline is
 not responsible in the first place. Isn't it enough to go into the
 Linaro tree, discretely and quietly? Then we can have a discussion
 about what to do about it within Linaro.

That's not how Linaro works. I forwarded it to the DRI list
to get technical input on what would be needed to have it merged
in mainline. If things were looking better on this front, we could
get it on track for mainline merging, and backport it into the Linaro
tree as soon as it hits linux-next. This is obviously not going
to happen unless we can find at least a subset of the code without
legal problems that we can clean up enough for integration.
 
 Frankly, this discussion (besides the sidetrack to the non-existant
 legal issues) did pop up a major problem in the possibility of
 unifying the IPU, dual GPU and other graphics subsystem frameworks on
 the i.MX processor line, and potentially others too (TI's LCDC and PVR
 graphics) in that DRM/DRI security policy will forbid them (in the
 form of David Arlie complaining) from sharing the same memory area,
 MMUs on or off. This actually means all 2D, 2D acceleration, 3D
 acceleration and DMA between the units requires bounce buffers and
 some overly complicated memory copying between memory areas for them
 to interoperate. I think TI hit this problem trying to get a texture
 from the DSP to the GPU to render it to a texture and came up with an
 awful (closed source :) method of ioctls and so on to achieve it. I
 had an idea to solve it using DRM and GEM but it's been shot down in
 concept now... what's the point? It'll never get into mainline.

Don't give up so early, there are a number of separate problems to
solve here. As far as I understand, the desire among many people
is to have the 3D acceleration hidden. Fine, so we can still do
accelerated 2D with free drivers and shouldn't be bothered by the
fact that we don't get 3D. There is a lot of work to do on proper
2D drivers and getting them into mainline still, so let's focus
on that and do a proper implementation for as many chips as possible.

By the time that is done, we may well have one or more manufacturers
willing to work with us on 3D support as well.

Arnd
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Dave Airlie
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 3:29 AM, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Tuesday 21 December 2010 03:17:40 Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
 On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Alan Cox wrote:

  My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
  single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
  without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.
 
  As a copyright holder on the kernel I'll also remind the people concerned
  that the definition of a derivative work is a legal not a technical one
  and if the kernel and user space cannot be used except together and one
  half depends on GPL elements I hope your lawyers have reviewed it
  carefully. I have never given anyone permission to link my GPL kernel
  contributions with anything but GPL code, modular or otherwise, except
  according to the derivative work rules laid down by the GPL (and indeed
  by the boundaries placed on copyright law).

 but it can be circumvented by writing GPL driver which will act as 'glue
 logic' inbetween userspace driver and which will work in kernel space?

 technically then driver would be GPL, except it's closed parts which will
 be ran in userspace... or can you forbid usage of certain closed userspace
 components with kernel?

 Anyone can try shipping this and risk a lawsuit, and all copyright holders
 of the kernel can try suing people that distribute such code. Most sensible
 people stay out of both the shipping questionable code and the suing part,
 but apparently the entire mobile phone industry is already doing both, so
 we can just wait and see if anyone has deep enough pockets to bring this
 up in court first ;-).

 Nobody will because it is unenforcable.

 The GPLv2 is written such that the if you're interfacing the kernel
 or compiler you don't need to opensource that bit with your app
 clause can actually be manipulated to basically disavow closed source
 code from having to be published as open source if it interfaces with
 the standard operating system components. It is meant to protect
 software developers from having to bundle a gigabyte of kernel and
 compiler code with their 100 line app that uses an ioctl, but legally
 it works against  the GPL in this way. It is what means AMD, nVidia,
 Intel (hi Alan), and others can produce binary code and binary
 executables that run on opensource kernels (wireless regulatory daemon
 in the early days) basically with impunity.

 You may think it's a horrible idea, and from a technical perspective
 it is, but from a legal perspective.. it's not a problem.

You should probably refrain from stating legal opinions around here,
Alan stated there is a possible issue legally and you should talk to
lawyers. I find his reasoning to be sane but no idea if its legal. The
point you are missing (you seem to not think much before typing) is
this:

you have two pieces of code, a userspace 3D *driver* (not
application), and a kernel driver talking to the hw, if the userspace
3D driver cannot exist without the kernel driver, it could very well
be considered a derivative work of the kernel driver. You are not
protected by the standard Linux system call exception since it states
normal system calls, so adding a driver to the kernel to expose a
bunch of driver specific ioctls to allow the userspace 3D work blurs
the lines sufficiently that you are into the domain of derived works
and should call your lawyers.



 Frankly, this discussion (besides the sidetrack to the non-existant
 legal issues) did pop up a major problem in the possibility of
 unifying the IPU, dual GPU and other graphics subsystem frameworks on
 the i.MX processor line, and potentially others too (TI's LCDC and PVR
 graphics) in that DRM/DRI security policy will forbid them (in the
 form of David Arlie complaining) from sharing the same memory area,
 MMUs on or off. This actually means all 2D, 2D acceleration, 3D
 acceleration and DMA between the units requires bounce buffers and
 some overly complicated memory copying between memory areas for them
 to interoperate. I think TI hit this problem trying to get a texture
 from the DSP to the GPU to render it to a texture and came up with an
 awful (closed source :) method of ioctls and so on to achieve it. I
 had an idea to solve it using DRM and GEM but it's been shot down in
 concept now... what's the point? It'll never get into mainline.

I never said the security policy would forbid anything, I said they
need to prove
that they've thought about these things and can prove they are secure, if this
requires opening the code and/or documents then that is the way it is. The
thing is if you require a userspace application with user privs to
access these devices
then you must stop the user from doing bad things, from my experience vendors
give little concern for these issues until

a) upstream people point out the problem and refuse to merge
b) they are used as the rootkit entry 

Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski

you have two pieces of code, a userspace 3D *driver* (not
application), and a kernel driver talking to the hw, if the userspace
3D driver cannot exist without the kernel driver, it could very well
be considered a derivative work of the kernel driver. You are not
protected by the standard Linux system call exception since it states
normal system calls, so adding a driver to the kernel to expose a
bunch of driver specific ioctls to allow the userspace 3D work blurs
the lines sufficiently that you are into the domain of derived works
and should call your lawyers.


so any user-written (gpl compatible) driver which exposes new ioctls
which allow other software to work (i.e. network driver allowing closed
source software to send and recieve packets is illegal aswell?

it is getting confusing...

shall everyone hire lawyer prior to using any software under linux?

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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski

You need to read before replying.

If the interface is a generic interface that any software can use then
its fine, when the interface is a specific interface for a specific
closed userspace driver it becomes questionable.

Again you are thinking general case when we are talking specifics.


thank you for claryfing , and for your time, excuse me my ignorance.

i think main reason of my confusion is lack of clear specification
of the 'specifics'. discussion becomes plainly too complex
and same development goes - code and strategies are developed before
clarification of the specifics, then people try to explain how they
interpreted law, and start to correct themselves, trying to drag the line
to their side.

i think this wastes time of everyone , of which most loud group are 
users, and most opressed - developers, and excuse me i am making humorous 
comments to point that.


i also hope 3d drivers will finally be free, and not require people to use 
tools like hacked ndiswrapper.



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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-21 Thread Matt Sealey
Okay I hereby refrain from legal comments.

In any case, this code has passed legal at Freescale and AMD *AND*
Qualcomm. It would not be GPL if it has not been vetted (and it took
them a year to get to this point).

-- 
Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com
Product Development Analyst, Genesi USA, Inc.



On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Dave Airlie airl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 3:29 AM, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Tuesday 21 December 2010 03:17:40 Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
 On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Alan Cox wrote:

  My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
  single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
  without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.
 
  As a copyright holder on the kernel I'll also remind the people concerned
  that the definition of a derivative work is a legal not a technical one
  and if the kernel and user space cannot be used except together and one
  half depends on GPL elements I hope your lawyers have reviewed it
  carefully. I have never given anyone permission to link my GPL kernel
  contributions with anything but GPL code, modular or otherwise, except
  according to the derivative work rules laid down by the GPL (and indeed
  by the boundaries placed on copyright law).

 but it can be circumvented by writing GPL driver which will act as 'glue
 logic' inbetween userspace driver and which will work in kernel space?

 technically then driver would be GPL, except it's closed parts which will
 be ran in userspace... or can you forbid usage of certain closed userspace
 components with kernel?

 Anyone can try shipping this and risk a lawsuit, and all copyright holders
 of the kernel can try suing people that distribute such code. Most sensible
 people stay out of both the shipping questionable code and the suing part,
 but apparently the entire mobile phone industry is already doing both, so
 we can just wait and see if anyone has deep enough pockets to bring this
 up in court first ;-).

 Nobody will because it is unenforcable.

 The GPLv2 is written such that the if you're interfacing the kernel
 or compiler you don't need to opensource that bit with your app
 clause can actually be manipulated to basically disavow closed source
 code from having to be published as open source if it interfaces with
 the standard operating system components. It is meant to protect
 software developers from having to bundle a gigabyte of kernel and
 compiler code with their 100 line app that uses an ioctl, but legally
 it works against  the GPL in this way. It is what means AMD, nVidia,
 Intel (hi Alan), and others can produce binary code and binary
 executables that run on opensource kernels (wireless regulatory daemon
 in the early days) basically with impunity.

 You may think it's a horrible idea, and from a technical perspective
 it is, but from a legal perspective.. it's not a problem.

 You should probably refrain from stating legal opinions around here,
 Alan stated there is a possible issue legally and you should talk to
 lawyers. I find his reasoning to be sane but no idea if its legal. The
 point you are missing (you seem to not think much before typing) is
 this:

 you have two pieces of code, a userspace 3D *driver* (not
 application), and a kernel driver talking to the hw, if the userspace
 3D driver cannot exist without the kernel driver, it could very well
 be considered a derivative work of the kernel driver. You are not
 protected by the standard Linux system call exception since it states
 normal system calls, so adding a driver to the kernel to expose a
 bunch of driver specific ioctls to allow the userspace 3D work blurs
 the lines sufficiently that you are into the domain of derived works
 and should call your lawyers.



 Frankly, this discussion (besides the sidetrack to the non-existant
 legal issues) did pop up a major problem in the possibility of
 unifying the IPU, dual GPU and other graphics subsystem frameworks on
 the i.MX processor line, and potentially others too (TI's LCDC and PVR
 graphics) in that DRM/DRI security policy will forbid them (in the
 form of David Arlie complaining) from sharing the same memory area,
 MMUs on or off. This actually means all 2D, 2D acceleration, 3D
 acceleration and DMA between the units requires bounce buffers and
 some overly complicated memory copying between memory areas for them
 to interoperate. I think TI hit this problem trying to get a texture
 from the DSP to the GPU to render it to a texture and came up with an
 awful (closed source :) method of ioctls and so on to achieve it. I
 had an idea to solve it using DRM and GEM but it's been shot down in
 concept now... what's the point? It'll never get into mainline.

 I never said the security policy would forbid anything, I said they
 need to prove
 that they've thought about these things and can prove they are secure, if 

Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-20 Thread Matt Sealey
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij 
 linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:

  On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 
  * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
              case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
              before it will get considered for mainline
   4 patches
   98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 
 
  Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
  and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
 
  Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
  is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
  goodies?
 
 All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
 belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library 
 to
 call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).

 Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
 have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation
 or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
 a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.

 Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
 suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
 we should at least not waste time reviewing it.

 The concerns about host memory access via the GPU driver are valid but
 unnecessary. The GPU MMU directly intervenes on memory access and can
 only modify memory space allocated to the GPU resource - getting data
 into this memory requires some extreme manual intervention if not done
 by the kernel driver itself; this memory area is set internally by the
 platform device resource.. As such (on the i.MX515 at least) the top
 64MB of memory reserved for the GPU is the only memory you need to
 worry about, and any corruption will be limited to invalid API usage
 which is also checked with assertions and other protection mechanisms.
 Any other unsecured memory location such as system RAM cannot be
 affected as the GPU MMU will not write or read any other memory than
 the defined resource. It is not an outside possibility that you may
 abuse the GPU to corrupt graphics RAM... but you can do that with any
 GPU even with security checks.

 Security check of radeon GPU are advance enough to even catch and
 forbid overwriting other process video memory (this is more or less
 true depending on the generation you are looking at).

 Ownership of the code is dependent on who licensed it. I do not think
 Linaro need be so concerned over opensourcing or reimplementing
 drivers. The fact that the kernel driver is open source as it is, and
 this is by far the most important part. The userspace library is
 closed because it is proprietary; and I think it is well outside
 Linaro's remit to lobby for opensourcing of proprietary code simply to
 meet an esoteric and needless demand for source code access (as it
 stands, you can get source code access by signing the usual plethora
 of NDAs with the appropriate vendor, as Genesi has done). It is my
 understanding that Freescale/AMD and Qualcomm maintain seperate forks
 of the driver and do not cooperate on development, and in any case,
 Linaro does not include Qualcomm anyway, therefore it is also to my
 understanding that this discussion is also beyond Linaro's remit.

 Can't we all just be happy that we actually have 3D drivers?

 So here you are advocating that we should accept any open source code
 inside the kernel just because it's open source and we love open
 source ? This is not how i understand the linux kernel project, we
 should not accept any open source driver that just add new api that we
 can't audit, test or understand. From my point of view any driver 
 new API should be introduced to support open source userspace. If GPU
 manufacturer don't want to open source their stack that's their issue
 but they should live with the pain of not having upstream kernel
 either. I believe, here i am just reformulating Dave point.

The code may need improvement but that's no reason to run around
saying everything needs to be open sourced, and that the solution is
in fact to reverse engineer the thing rather than accept it as the
current solution. Given how long nouveau and later Radeon card support
has taken in real life, even with full documentation from AMD, I
seriously doubt Linaro are going to be the ones to somehow make the
world change for OpenSource embedded GPU graphics. Linaro doesn't
exist just to spend all their time undermining the status quo for the
sake of it.

I also do not think that it is at all kernel policy to disallow kernel
drivers which do 

Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-20 Thread Jerome Glisse
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Matt Sealey m...@genesi-usa.com wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij 
 linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:

  On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 
  * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
              case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
              before it will get considered for mainline
   4 patches
   98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 
 
  Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
  and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
 
  Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
  is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
  goodies?
 
 All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
 belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library 
 to
 call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).

 Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
 have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation
 or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
 a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.

 Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
 suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
 we should at least not waste time reviewing it.

 The concerns about host memory access via the GPU driver are valid but
 unnecessary. The GPU MMU directly intervenes on memory access and can
 only modify memory space allocated to the GPU resource - getting data
 into this memory requires some extreme manual intervention if not done
 by the kernel driver itself; this memory area is set internally by the
 platform device resource.. As such (on the i.MX515 at least) the top
 64MB of memory reserved for the GPU is the only memory you need to
 worry about, and any corruption will be limited to invalid API usage
 which is also checked with assertions and other protection mechanisms.
 Any other unsecured memory location such as system RAM cannot be
 affected as the GPU MMU will not write or read any other memory than
 the defined resource. It is not an outside possibility that you may
 abuse the GPU to corrupt graphics RAM... but you can do that with any
 GPU even with security checks.

 Security check of radeon GPU are advance enough to even catch and
 forbid overwriting other process video memory (this is more or less
 true depending on the generation you are looking at).

 Ownership of the code is dependent on who licensed it. I do not think
 Linaro need be so concerned over opensourcing or reimplementing
 drivers. The fact that the kernel driver is open source as it is, and
 this is by far the most important part. The userspace library is
 closed because it is proprietary; and I think it is well outside
 Linaro's remit to lobby for opensourcing of proprietary code simply to
 meet an esoteric and needless demand for source code access (as it
 stands, you can get source code access by signing the usual plethora
 of NDAs with the appropriate vendor, as Genesi has done). It is my
 understanding that Freescale/AMD and Qualcomm maintain seperate forks
 of the driver and do not cooperate on development, and in any case,
 Linaro does not include Qualcomm anyway, therefore it is also to my
 understanding that this discussion is also beyond Linaro's remit.

 Can't we all just be happy that we actually have 3D drivers?

 So here you are advocating that we should accept any open source code
 inside the kernel just because it's open source and we love open
 source ? This is not how i understand the linux kernel project, we
 should not accept any open source driver that just add new api that we
 can't audit, test or understand. From my point of view any driver 
 new API should be introduced to support open source userspace. If GPU
 manufacturer don't want to open source their stack that's their issue
 but they should live with the pain of not having upstream kernel
 either. I believe, here i am just reformulating Dave point.

 The code may need improvement but that's no reason to run around
 saying everything needs to be open sourced, and that the solution is
 in fact to reverse engineer the thing rather than accept it as the
 current solution. Given how long nouveau and later Radeon card support
 has taken in real life, even with full documentation from AMD, I
 seriously doubt Linaro are going to be the ones to somehow make the
 world change for OpenSource embedded GPU graphics. Linaro doesn't
 exist just to spend all their time undermining the status quo for the
 sake of it.

 I 

Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-20 Thread Dave Airlie

 The concerns about host memory access via the GPU driver are valid but
 unnecessary. The GPU MMU directly intervenes on memory access and can
 only modify memory space allocated to the GPU resource - getting data
 into this memory requires some extreme manual intervention if not done
 by the kernel driver itself; this memory area is set internally by the
 platform device resource.. As such (on the i.MX515 at least) the top
 64MB of memory reserved for the GPU is the only memory you need to
 worry about, and any corruption will be limited to invalid API usage
 which is also checked with assertions and other protection mechanisms.
 Any other unsecured memory location such as system RAM cannot be
 affected as the GPU MMU will not write or read any other memory than
 the defined resource. It is not an outside possibility that you may
 abuse the GPU to corrupt graphics RAM... but you can do that with any
 GPU even with security checks.

 Ownership of the code is dependent on who licensed it. I do not think
 Linaro need be so concerned over opensourcing or reimplementing
 drivers. The fact that the kernel driver is open source as it is, and
 this is by far the most important part. The userspace library is
 closed because it is proprietary; and I think it is well outside
 Linaro's remit to lobby for opensourcing of proprietary code simply to
 meet an esoteric and needless demand for source code access (as it
 stands, you can get source code access by signing the usual plethora
 of NDAs with the appropriate vendor, as Genesi has done). It is my
 understanding that Freescale/AMD and Qualcomm maintain seperate forks
 of the driver and do not cooperate on development, and in any case,
 Linaro does not include Qualcomm anyway, therefore it is also to my
 understanding that this discussion is also beyond Linaro's remit.

 Can't we all just be happy that we actually have 3D drivers?

Can't you just use Windows? why bother with open source at all if you
are willing to give up.

My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.

I will accept kernel code to initialise chips, set modes, do all that,
I won't accept new ioctl interfaces to userspace that cannot be
validated and have no use other than to serve the closed user blob.
The reason for this is the burden of maintaining the code/interfaces
falls onto the kernel community when we accept code. Now if we can no
longer validate that the interfaces work without running a binary blob
or we cannot change the interfaces without having to lobby some other
entity to change their blob then maintaining that code in the upstream
kernel is pointless.

I have no problem with closed 3D drivers I just want the manufacturers
to understand that if you want to go down that path you get to keep
both halves.

Dave.
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-20 Thread Alan Cox
 My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
 single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
 without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.

As a copyright holder on the kernel I'll also remind the people concerned
that the definition of a derivative work is a legal not a technical one
and if the kernel and user space cannot be used except together and one
half depends on GPL elements I hope your lawyers have reviewed it
carefully. I have never given anyone permission to link my GPL kernel
contributions with anything but GPL code, modular or otherwise, except
according to the derivative work rules laid down by the GPL (and indeed
by the boundaries placed on copyright law).

Alan
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-20 Thread Alan Cox
 I also do not think that it is at all kernel policy to disallow kernel
 drivers which do not have opensource userspace components. In fact,

Wrong. The PVR graphics (as used by some Intel embedded for example) is
also not in the kernel for the same reason, ditto some sensor and GPS
devices which are useless without a magic proprietary library.

There are lots of reasons for refusing such code

- Legality questions
- Testability
- Security
- Risk of locking us to proprietary interfaces when we can't change the
  user one

and more

Alan
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-20 Thread Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski

On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Alan Cox wrote:


My point which people keep missing is that graphics stacks are a
single entity, that span kernel and userspace, one cannot exist
without the other, and there are interfaces that join them.


As a copyright holder on the kernel I'll also remind the people concerned
that the definition of a derivative work is a legal not a technical one
and if the kernel and user space cannot be used except together and one
half depends on GPL elements I hope your lawyers have reviewed it
carefully. I have never given anyone permission to link my GPL kernel
contributions with anything but GPL code, modular or otherwise, except
according to the derivative work rules laid down by the GPL (and indeed
by the boundaries placed on copyright law).


but it can be circumvented by writing GPL driver which will act as 'glue 
logic' inbetween userspace driver and which will work in kernel space?


technically then driver would be GPL, except it's closed parts which will 
be ran in userspace... or can you forbid usage of certain closed userspace 
components with kernel?


p.s. let's skip for now discussion who should write such driver, as i 
understand anyone can do it anyway.


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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-14 Thread Dave Airlie
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij 
 linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:

  On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 
  * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
              case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
              before it will get considered for mainline
   4 patches
   98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 
 
  Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
  and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
 
  Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
  is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
  goodies?
 
 All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
 belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library to
 call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).

 Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
 have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation
 or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
 a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.

Yeah even with the open kernel bits it makes no sense to upstream if
they never release the userspace,
since a GPU stack is a hw to sw interface stack you can't design a 3D
userspace driver without having
control of the kernel userspace interface, so setting an ABI in stone
for something that forces anyone
doing future development down a strict path is of no benefit.

Dave.
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-14 Thread Arnd Bergmann
On Tuesday 14 December 2010, Eric Miao wrote:
 
  Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
  suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
  we should at least not waste time reviewing it.
 
  I think it is beneficial for us to integrate the kernel part into our Linaro
  tree, so that we can build/use it together with the kernel image. As for the
  user space libraries, how about adding them into the hwpack? (Is there any
  legal issue for this?)
 
 I think so, there's normally a rule if free redistribution is allowed
 or not, even it's closed source.

Well, it can be in the hardware pack, I guess, but I don't think we
should even consider including the driver in the Linaro kernel:

The rule is that we only include code that is on an upstream track
(i.e. merged in an -rc or -next release), which this one clearly
is not at the moment, as Dave Airlie has made quite clear.

We could have a git tree containing all the questionable graphics
drivers (amd, sgx, mali) that rely on proprietary user space libraries,
and allow these to be built against the Linaro kernel, but it needs
to be quite clear that this is in not part of our project.

Arnd
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Arnd Bergmann
On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij 
 linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:
 
  On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 
  * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
  case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
  before it will get considered for mainline
   4 patches
   98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 
 
  Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
  and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
 
  Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
  is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
  goodies?
  
 All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
 belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library to
 call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).

Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation
or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.

Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
we should at least not waste time reviewing it.

Arnd
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Jerome Glisse
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij 
 linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:

  On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
 
  * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
              case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
              before it will get considered for mainline
   4 patches
   98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 
 
  Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
  and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
 
  Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
  is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
  goodies?
 
 All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
 belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library to
 call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).

 Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
 have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation
 or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
 a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.

 Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
 suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
 we should at least not waste time reviewing it.

        Arnd

From a quick look it also seems that the API exposed to userspace
would allow easy abuse of the GPU to access any system ram. There is a
reason we do expensive command checking in the other amd gpu driver
(drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/*cs.c files)

Cheers,
Jerome
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Jerome Glisse
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Jammy Zhou jammy.z...@linaro.org wrote:


 On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
  On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
  On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij
  linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:
 
   On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
  
   * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
               case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
               before it will get considered for mainline
    4 patches
    98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  
  
   Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
   and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
  
   Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
   is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
   goodies?
  
  All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
  belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace
  library to
  call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).
 
  Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
  have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a
  reimplementation
  or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
  a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.
 
  Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
  suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
  we should at least not waste time reviewing it.
 
         Arnd

 From a quick look it also seems that the API exposed to userspace
 would allow easy abuse of the GPU to access any system ram. There is a
 reason we do expensive command checking in the other amd gpu driver
 (drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/*cs.c files)

 No, the memory used by the GPU is reserved at boot time, so I think there is
 no such a problem.


 Cheers,
 Jerome



This isn't about what's reserved, this is about GPU capacity, if the
GPU is isolated through an IOMMU and the GPU can't reprogram it then
fine. But if not, then it's easy to abuse packet to reprogram the GPU
GART (either by reprogramming GART register or by overwritting GART
table) to point to any system ram.

Cheers,
Jerome
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Jerome Glisse
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:30 PM, Jammy Zhou jammy.z...@linaro.org wrote:


 On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Jammy Zhou jammy.z...@linaro.org wrote:
 
 
  On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com
  wrote:
 
  On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
   On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
   On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij
   linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:
  
On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
   
* amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally
the
            case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
            before it will get considered for mainline
 4 patches
 98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
   
   
Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave
Airlie
and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
   
Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
goodies?
   
   All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160
   (now
   belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace
   library to
   call these functionality (buffer management, command submission,
   ...).
  
   Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
   have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a
   reimplementation
   or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier
   with
   a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.
  
   Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I
   would
   suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
   we should at least not waste time reviewing it.
  
          Arnd
 
  From a quick look it also seems that the API exposed to userspace
  would allow easy abuse of the GPU to access any system ram. There is a
  reason we do expensive command checking in the other amd gpu driver
  (drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/*cs.c files)
 
  No, the memory used by the GPU is reserved at boot time, so I think
  there is
  no such a problem.
 
 
  Cheers,
  Jerome
 
 

 This isn't about what's reserved, this is about GPU capacity, if the
 GPU is isolated through an IOMMU and the GPU can't reprogram it then
 fine. But if not, then it's easy to abuse packet to reprogram the GPU
 GART (either by reprogramming GART register or by overwritting GART
 table) to point to any system ram.

 For non-PCI GPU in embedded world, there is no GART concept. Besides, the
 GPU MMU is disabled currently for some hardware problem.


In a weird way you lucky ;)

Cheers,
Jerome Glisse
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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Jammy Zhou
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:

 On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
  On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij linus.wall...@linaro.org
 wrote:
 
   On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
  
   * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
   case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
   before it will get considered for mainline
4 patches
98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  
  
   Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
   and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
  
   Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
   is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
   goodies?
  
  All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
  belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library
 to
  call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).

 Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
 have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation
 or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
 a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.


The user space library is closed source, and it is owned by Qualcomm.



 Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
 suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
 we should at least not waste time reviewing it.


I think it is beneficial for us to integrate the kernel part into our Linaro
tree, so that we can build/use it together with the kernel image. As for the
user space libraries, how about adding them into the hwpack? (Is there any
legal issue for this?)



Arnd

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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Jammy Zhou
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
  On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
  On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij 
 linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:
 
   On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
  
   * amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
   case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
   before it will get considered for mainline
4 patches
98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  
  
   Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
   and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
  
   Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
   is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
   goodies?
  
  All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
  belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace
 library to
  call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).
 
  Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
  have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a
 reimplementation
  or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
  a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.
 
  Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
  suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
  we should at least not waste time reviewing it.
 
 Arnd

 From a quick look it also seems that the API exposed to userspace
 would allow easy abuse of the GPU to access any system ram. There is a
 reason we do expensive command checking in the other amd gpu driver
 (drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/*cs.c files)


No, the memory used by the GPU is reserved at boot time, so I think there is
no such a problem.



 Cheers,
 Jerome

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Re: Freescale Linux BSP review

2010-12-13 Thread Jammy Zhou
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Jammy Zhou jammy.z...@linaro.org wrote:
 
 
  On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Jerome Glisse j.gli...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
  On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
   On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
   On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij
   linus.wall...@linaro.orgwrote:
  
On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann a...@arndb.de wrote:
   
* amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally
 the
case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions
before it will get considered for mainline
 4 patches
 98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
   
   
Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie
and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
   
Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or
is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL
goodies?
   
   All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now
   belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace
   library to
   call these functionality (buffer management, command submission,
 ...).
  
   Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we
   have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a
   reimplementation
   or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with
   a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.
  
   Until there is a solution with an open source user space part, I would
   suggest that the driver better be dropped from the Freescale BSP and
   we should at least not waste time reviewing it.
  
  Arnd
 
  From a quick look it also seems that the API exposed to userspace
  would allow easy abuse of the GPU to access any system ram. There is a
  reason we do expensive command checking in the other amd gpu driver
  (drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/*cs.c files)
 
  No, the memory used by the GPU is reserved at boot time, so I think there
 is
  no such a problem.
 
 
  Cheers,
  Jerome
 
 

 This isn't about what's reserved, this is about GPU capacity, if the
 GPU is isolated through an IOMMU and the GPU can't reprogram it then
 fine. But if not, then it's easy to abuse packet to reprogram the GPU
 GART (either by reprogramming GART register or by overwritting GART
 table) to point to any system ram.


For non-PCI GPU in embedded world, there is no GART concept. Besides, the
GPU MMU is disabled currently for some hardware problem.



 Cheers,
 Jerome

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