[HN Gopher] Reverse-Engineering the Mali G78 ___________________________________________________________________ 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.) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-20 23:00 UTC)