Free and open-source graphics device driver: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 12:40, 31 December 2024

Revision as of 14:24, 31 January 2025

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The [[desktop computer]] market was long dominated by PC hardware using the [[x86]]/[[x86-64]] instruction set and GPUs available for the PC. With three major competitors (Nvidia, AMD and Intel). The main competing factor was the price of hardware and raw performance in 3D computer games, which is greatly affected by the efficient translation of API calls into GPU opcodes. The display driver and the [[video decoder]] are inherent parts of the graphics card: hardware designed to assist in the calculations necessary for the decoding of video streams. As the market for PC hardware has dwindled, it seems unlikely that new competitors will enter this market and it is unclear how much more knowledge one company could gain by seeing the source code of other companies' drivers.

The mobile sector presents a different situation. The functional blocks (the [[application-specific integrated circuit]] display driver, 2-2D and 3D acceleration and video decoding and encoding) are separate [[semiconductor intellectual property]] (SIP) blocks on the chip, since hardware devices vary substantially; some [[portable media player]]s require a display driver that accelerates video decoding, but does not require 3D acceleration. The development goal is not only raw 3D performance, but system integration, power consumption and 2D capabilities. There is also an approach which abandons the traditional method ([[Analog television|Vsync]]) of updating the display and makes better use of [[sample and hold]] technology to lower power consumption.

During the second quarter of 2013 79.3 percent of [[smartphone]]s sold worldwide were running a version of [[Android (operating system)|Android]],<ref>{{cite web | url = https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/android-nears-80-market-share-in-global-smartphone-shipments-as-ios-and-blackberry-share-slides-per-idc/ | title = Android Nears 80% Market Share In Global Smartphone Shipments, As iOS And BlackBerry Share Slides, Per IDC| date = 7 August 2013}}</ref> and the Linux kernel dominates smartphones. Hardware developers have an incentive to deliver Linux drivers for their hardware but, due to competition, no incentive to make these drivers free and open-source. Additional problems are the Android-specific augmentations to the Linux kernel which have not been accepted in [[BitTorrent (software)|mainline]], such as the [[Atomic Display Framework]] (ADF).<ref>{{cite web |url=https://lwn.net/Articles/565422/ |title=Atomic Display Framework}}</ref> ADF is a feature of 3.10 AOSP kernels which provides a [[Direct Rendering Manager#DMA Buffer Sharing and PRIME|dma-buf]]-centric framework between Android's hwcomposer [[HAL (software)|HAL]] and the kernel driver. ADF significantly overlaps with the [[Direct Rendering Manager|DRM]]-[[Mode setting|KMS]] framework. ADF has not been accepted into mainline, but a different set of solutions addressing the same problems (known as [[atomic mode setting]]) is under development. Projects such as [[Hybris (software)|libhybris]] harness Android device drivers to run on Linux platforms other than Android.