From I remember, back int the 90's, "copy protection", was the common term in use.
The legal term for it, from the DMCA, "Technological Protection Measures", also conflicts with another acronym :)
I think ARM-based chips and embedded GPUs continue to be problematic. Powering up a GPU is not the issue, it's accessing the silicon that does specialised accelerated functionality without getting tied into some crazy legal stuff with the documentation required to do so. Reverse engineering your way to a working GPU driver is quite an effort.
I think I first came across this issue in the PineTab [1]. I was trying to do some kind of streaming from the device but it was ultra slow. After some search I found that Sunxi [2] was the only real serious effort at the time, and that it was sporting a Mali400 [3] [4]. ARM were not particularly friendly in open sourcing GPU code for the kernel and it was largely a reverse engineering effort that got anything working at all [5].
All this to say, I would rather support some kind of open-source GPU effort [6], especially if it could be boiled down to a small SoC or module. I saw this crazy 160 core RISC-V M.2 cluster performing ray tracing, and it really seems like we could get there [7].
[1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTab
[2] https://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner_SoC_Family
[3] https://linux-sunxi.org/A64
[4] https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_...
[6] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/new-open-sou...
Aurornis•7mo ago
lawlessone•7mo ago
p0w3n3d•7mo ago
rendaw•7mo ago
Like take this:
> substantial progress on the DRM infrastructure required to write GPU drivers
It's basically saying
> substantial progress on the GPU driver infrastructure required to write GPU drivers
The headline could just be "Tyr, a new Rust CSF-based ARM Mali GPU driver" which is both shorter and avoids the DRM confusion.