[Pkg-Mali-devel] mali-400 usespace drivers

[Maxime Ripard]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 08:36:16AM +0100, Guillaume Tucker wrote:
> On 29/06/18 08:32, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 06:35:34PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> > > I am the maintainer of the debian mali packages, both free kernel
> > > drivers and non-free userspace drivers.
> > 
> > Nice mail-meeting you :)
> > 
> > > I saw your announcement for mali-400 binaries from allwinner, and
> > > wondered about putting them in the mali-utgard-driver debian package
> > > (in preparation).
> > > 
> > > However, grabing the files from
> > > https://github.com/free-electrons/mali-blobs I see that the allwinner
> > > licence does not seem to allow general redistribution, only
> > > redistribution by customers, via a specific github URL. Is that your
> > > understanding?
> > > 
> > > It also seems to restrict use and copying to 'users of github' which
> > > is a rather bizarre restriction.
> > > 
> > > If this is the case then I don't thnk Debian can put these binaries in
> > > a package, which is a pain.
> > > 
> > > I note that the mali-450 r6p1 drivers are available from ARM with
> > > the new licence:
> > > https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/mali-drivers/user-space/hikey/mali450r6p001rel0linux1armhftar.gz
> > > which suggests that this vintage of driver _could_ be licenced to
> > > allow redistribution. We could try pestering some lawyers to get
> > > this fixed, but it's always an incredibly slow purpose.
> > 
> > Allwinner has been helpful on this in the past, so I guess we could
> > try to ask them to clarify. But it might take a while yeah.
> > 
> > > I suppose the only alternative is a 'downloading' package which grabs
> > > the files from the specified location on installation.
> > > 
> > > We can still do testing to make sure the packaged kernel driver works
> > > with these binaries. I see you got mali DTB info upstreamed for A23
> > > and A33. Which kernel version did that go into? Ideally we'd be able
> > > to have DTB info for Hikey (mali-450) and A23/A33 in mainline kernels,
> > > so one packaged out-of-tree dkms module should work for both. Is that
> > > plausible?
> 
> It seems like one mali-utgard dkms driver should work for all
> Utgard GPUs in principle, but yes the issue is with the
> user-space just like for Midgard or Bifrost.

I currently maintain this: https://github.com/mripard/sunxi-mali

And while it has sunxi in its name, it's just an implementation of the
upstream's DT bindings and I believe should work with any SoC using an
Utgard with the proper bindings.

This hasn't been tested so far, but I'd be more than happy to be in a
situation where the mali driver is shared by multiple platforms,
instead of duplicating the maintainance effort like it's done at this
point.

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons)
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com
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