Is this perhaps a foretelling of what is to come?<p>If Arm plan to drop Mali completely, to be replaced by something from Nvidia, this could be an early step to washing their hands of driver itself.<p>Edit: That was a bit cynical. More charitably, open sourcing the driver under these circumstances would allow the community to continue to use and support Mali even if Arm were looking to discontinue it.
For context, when Alyssa Rosenzweig initially started this reverse engineering effort, she published releases via TOR out of fear of retribution from ARM. This was in response to the mysterious firing of the main person driving earlier reverse engineering efforts with clear hints at pressure from ARM. All allegedly of course, please don't sue me.
I still don't understand the reluctance to get their drivers into the mainline kernel under an open source license. They have nothing to lose and so much to gain. Any SBC, Phone, Notebook will be easier to sell if it can run a mainline kernel. Android Updates will become much less of a problem and just the sheer amount of free QA work in form of bugtracker items should be well worth the effort. I do hope nvidia starts to realize this aswell and makes their drivers less closed and annoying to use on linux.<p>I suspect the issue is a little bit of licensing and a lot of "management" and people that think that "proprietary" is a good thing.
This gives NVidia an go to market strategy for ARM licensees, use the "community" GPU that is bundled with your ARM license or use the "pro" GPU that costs an additional $$ and you license drivers from NVidia.
The article starts by saying:<p>"Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide a particular bug is not important to them, so you’d be out of luck."<p>Why is it then that nvidia is singled out for hatred in this regard? nvidia is an evil, baby-killing company for not open sourcing its drivers, but all the others with closed drivers (including ARM up until today) don't get hated on.<p>The drivers are not open source, but nvidia has released quite a few open source projects. I admit I haven't used any of them, maybe they are shit, I don't know. I just googled "nvidia open source" to find them.<p><a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source" rel="nofollow">https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source</a>
<a href="https://github.com/NVIDIA" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NVIDIA</a>