Free and open-source graphics device driver

Binary drivers used in the context of operating systems that are prone to ongoing development and change (such as Linux) create problems for end users and package maintainers.

These problems, which affect system stability, security and performance, are the main reason for the independent development of free and open-source drivers.

"[6] Writer and computer scientist Peter Gutmann has expressed concern that the digital rights management scheme in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system may limit the availability of the documentation required to write open drivers, since it "requires that the operational details of the device be kept confidential.

[11] When applications such as a 3D game engine or a 3D computer graphics software shunt calculations from the CPU to the GPU, they usually use a special-purpose API like OpenGL or Direct3D and do not address the hardware directly.

Because all translation (from API calls to GPU opcodes) is done by the device driver, it contains specialized knowledge and is an object of optimization.

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.

There is also an approach which abandons the traditional method (Vsync) of updating the display and makes better use of sample and hold technology to lower power consumption.

Additional problems are the Android-specific augmentations to the Linux kernel which have not been accepted in mainline, such as the Atomic Display Framework (ADF).

The VESA driver supports most graphics cards without acceleration and at display resolutions limited to a set programmed in the Video BIOS by the manufacturer.

[19][20] The free and open-source Radeon graphics device drivers are not reverse-engineered, but are based on documentation released by AMD without the requirement to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

[18] All components of the Radeon graphics device driver are developed by core contributors and interested parties worldwide.

[44] On 31 January 2014, Nvidia employee Alexandre Courbot committed an extensive patch set which adds initial support for the GK20A (Tegra K1) to Nouveau.

[45] In June 2014, Codethink reportedly ran a Wayland-based Weston compositor with Linux kernel 3.15, using EGL and a "100% open-source graphics driver stack" on a Tegra K1.

[49] Nvidia and a partner, Avionic Design, were working on submitting Grate (free and open-source drivers for Tegra) upstream of the mainline Linux kernel in April 2012.

[50][51] The company's co-founder and CEO laid out the Tegra processor roadmap with Ubuntu Unity at the 2013 GPU Technology Conference.

In May 2022, Nvidia announced a new initiative and policy to open source its GPU Loadable Kernel Modules with dual GPL/MIT license, but only new models at alpha quality.

On January 21, 2012, Phoronix reported that Luc Verhaegen was driving a reverse-engineering attempt aimed at the Arm Mali series of GPUs (specifically, the Mali-200 and Mali-400 versions).

[63][64] On February 2, 2013, Verhaegen demonstrated Quake III Arena in timedemo mode, running on top of the Lima driver.

Due to its wide use in embedded devices, the Free Software Foundation has put reverse-engineering of the PowerVR driver on its high-priority project list.

Although the kernel component is open-source (GPL), the user-space components—consisting of the GLES(2) implementations and a HAL library—are not; these contain the bulk of the driver logic.

Wladimir J. van der Laan found and documented the state bits, command stream and shader ISA by studying how the blobs work, examining and manipulating command-stream dumps.

[75][76] In a referenced blog post, Clark wrote that he was doing the project in his spare time and that the Qualcomm platform was his only viable target for working on open 3D graphics.

Clark demonstrated Freedreno running desktop compositing, the XBMC media player and Quake III Arena at FOSDEM on February 2, 2013.

[85] The DDX driver gained support for server-managed file descriptors requiring X.Org Server version 1.16 and above in July 2014.

[90] The Raspberry Pi Foundation, in co-operation with Broadcom, announced on October 24, 2012, that they open-sourced "all the ARM (CPU) code that drives the GPU".

[92] Since there was neither a toolchain targeting the proprietary GPU nor a documented instruction set, no advantage could be taken if the firmware source code became available.

[99] DisplayLink announced an open-source project, Libdlo,[100] with the goal of bringing support for their USB graphics technology to Linux and other platforms.

Red Hat has two full-time employees (David Airlie and Jérôme Glisse) working on Radeon software,[102] and the Fedora Project sponsors a Fedora Graphics Test Week event before the launch of their new Linux distribution versions to test free graphics drivers.

[105] The Milkymist system on a chip, targeted at embedded graphics instead of desktop computers, supports a VGA output, a limited vertex shader and a 2D texturing unit.

There are currently a couple of open-source toolchains available, however, for Lattice-based FPGAs (notably for iCE40 and ECP5 boards) which utilize Project IceStorm,[110] and Trellis,[111] respectively.