[HN Gopher] Reverse-Engineering the Mali G78
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       Reverse-Engineering the Mali G78
        
       Author : caution
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2021-07-20 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.collabora.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.collabora.com)
        
       | nicoburns wrote:
       | I don't understand why ARM don't just release the source to their
       | drivers. Seems like they'd have a lot to gain and little to lose
       | bu doing so.
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | such colossal public good.
       | 
       | kind of weird to me that we still have so few phones that have
       | started running mainline. there's a lot of postmarketOS phones,
       | but my understanding is they Helium/libhybris which mixes in a
       | ton of the Android support infrastructure/drivers to do the job.
       | i could be overly concerned, but there being so few distributions
       | & such specific distributions targeting phones is exactly the
       | good this work OUGHT to be unlocking, & it just seems like
       | progress in making that happen is disorganized / not really
       | happening, alas alas alas.
       | 
       | getting a toe-hold in, where we start to see self-determinism on
       | what our devices run, would be such a compelling & powerful
       | vision. i really hope we can start to see that!
       | 
       | ubuntu touch targets the Pixel3. i'd be curious to know what they
       | did. PinePhone & Purism really took it from the top, have their
       | own hardware that starts in a more easy-to-work with set up. but
       | I don't see why that would be required to get a decent regular
       | linux distro (arch, debian) running on a phone, with a gui (sans
       | many device drivers!).
        
         | opan wrote:
         | Some of the better-supported pmOS devices are running mainline,
         | such as the OnePlus 6.
        
       | anonymousiam wrote:
       | Over 30 years ago, I was doing some OS9 (Microware, not Apple)
       | development on a 68k embedded target. I needed a PIO driver that
       | could do bi-directional I/O. The OS came with a PIO driver, but
       | it wouldn't let you switch directions. I approached the vendor
       | with several options:
       | 
       | 1) I will pay you to write another driver with this
       | functionality.
       | 
       | 2) License the driver source code to me and I will do it.
       | 
       | For reasons I do not remember, they would not do either.
       | 
       | I ended up reversing their PIO driver and implementing a version
       | with the functionality I needed. I was uneasy about doing this,
       | but we never sold or distributed the work so it was probably
       | legal. (The development was for an in-house application with just
       | one target.)
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-20 23:00 UTC)