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Comment by chinhodado | Hacker News Reader

> If ARM really cared, GPU stuff would be open source. The fact it isn't pretty strong indication they don't. Don't just accept it when lawyers say no.

Easy for you to say, harder when millions to hundreds of millions are at stake.

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Its always easier to be an armchair critic, but I bet there are more than hundreds of millions waiting for whoever can de-crappify the embedded ARM driver ecosystem.

Especially when this crap is at the root of why virtually every embedded linux product has serious security flaws that never get fixed. You cant update the kernel if you cant update the drivers.

If there is a reason on why ARM's GPU drivers are not updated on your device, it's hardly ARM's fault. ARM doesn't ship the SoC or the device directly to you, it ships it to the OEM. And it's the OEM who states the agreements.

If you want to blame someone, starting by blaming the OEM.

ARM still writes the drivers for the chip and then dosent update or open them up. Not much OEMs can do about that.

But ARM cannot, and won't, officially support the OEM's devices and start releasing updates for them. The process is a bit more complex than you might be imagining.

It still has to start at the top, and if they did update their drivers at least open source projects could then update on said platforms instead of being stuck on a 5 year old kernel till the end of time.

ARM has a reference design which includes drivers. The OEM is responsible for the final design and validation. ARM cannot take responsibility for validating 1000s of implementations that vary in both hardware and software configurations and validate them for billions of devices. Neither can the FOSS community. For the handful of boards which are popular enough to have sufficient tracking for the FOSS community to take the wheel if an open source driver was available the OEM has sufficient incentive to support their platform. For the other 4,999,999,990 LowHo NiHao industries unbranded boards it wouldn't matter in the first place.

> but I bet there are more than hundreds of millions waiting for whoever can de-crappify the embedded ARM driver ecosystem.

Hyperbole much? 7 billion people on the planet, and "more than hundreds of millions" of them are waiting with bated breath for the "de-crappification of the embedded ARM driver ecosystem"?!?

I think you'll find the hundreds of millions in question were dollars, not people.

You're almost certainly right. Oops!

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