Stefan Mileschin

TI's ARM man Rob Clark, who is famous for Texas Instrument's OMAP DRM driver, has spent his spare time building a natty open sauce driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon.

Clark's open-source Linux graphics driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon / Adreno is getting a lot of attention as it is a reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver for an ARM-based SoC.

While there are some open-source Texas Instruments OMAP and Samsung Exynos drivers, they are not backed by the respective companies, they don't offer up accelerated support and are not fully open-source stacks.

Texas Instruments' OMAP competes with Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Clark worked on reverse-engineering the competitor's graphics core in his free time.

Clark told Phoronix that this was his pet project and that he has just been doing this reverse engineering and driver writing during his free time outside of work.

Texas Instruments hasn't blessed the project and in fact it was not aware of it .

He worked on the Snapdragon because he is a big fan of open-source graphics drivers, but TI is not really interested in doing much more than its current OMAP driver.

Clark was quoted as saying that he would love to be working on an open source and upstream driver for the SGX GPU on OMAP platforms. But due to what he knows and has access to about the inner workings of the IMGtech GPU's, that would not be possible without IMG's approval.

He said that IMG is not a big fan of the open source community and he is forced to look elsewhere to contribute.

We guess things might get a bit quiet when he shows up in the office this morning, with everyone looking up from their desks while the piano player suddenly stops and dives under a table.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/texas-...pdragon-driver