Luc Verhaegen

A bespoke OSHW HDMI video capture solution is being developed for use at FOSDEM and other open source conferences. This talk will explain the what, why, how and hopefully when.

FOSDEM is unique in that it has 750+ talks on two days, with more than 28 parallel tracks. All are captured and streamed out live, and a sanitised version of each talk is re-encoded for separate viewing after the event. For each track, there are (at least) two capture boxes, one for the speakers' laptop (which also feeds the projector), and at least one for a camera. This means FOSDEM has close to 60 video capture boxes deployed.

The FOSDEM video boxes are also used at several other conferences, and we are in active contact with several more, as each conference basically has the same problem to solve, albeit at a smaller scale than FOSDEM.

Today, our capture boxes are an amalgamation of many different devices tied together, and while the whole is working surprisingly well, it is far from ideal. Some bits are non-free, some bits are hard or even impossible to control, and the result is bulky and, relatively speaking, expensive. Sourcing the exact same components again to expand the current array of boxes is nigh impossible, and the bulk of these boxes means that deployment is more of a hassle than it could be.

To solve almost all of our issues, we are creating a bespoke HDMI capture solution by tying a HDMI-to-parallel-RGB decoder chip to the camera input of the venerable Allwinner A20 SoC. The Allwinner A20 was chosen due to its feature set, large community (linux-sunxi), its advanced upstream support and the availability of OSHW board designs. We were lucky to find a suitable board in the Olimex Lime2 (which is OSHW), which exposes all the necessary IO pins on pinheaders.

Capturing 1280x720@50Hz, encoding it to h.264 for local storage and streaming over the network, while displaying the captured frames directly to HDMI or VGA (projector) and a status LCD, while also capturing (and passing through) audio is a challenge on this cheap, low power but open hardware. It forces us to make use of a wide array of SoC HW blocks, not all of which previously had driver support, and we are close to saturate the available memory and bus bandwidth.

So while a good part of this talk is about describing the bigger problem we are trying to solve, this project very much is an issue of hardware enablement.

Other people: Mark Van den Borre Gerry

The Tamil driver is to the Mali T series GPUs what the lima driver is for the older Mali M200/400/450 GPUs.

Libv did the preliminary command stream REing work in September 2013, by creating a command stream tracer (capable of capture and replay) and by exposing the binary shader compiler. Over the 2014 end of year period, he then spent some time decyphering various renders, and he will hopefully be showing off the first few native renders at FOSDEM.

This short talk covers the Allwinner SoCs display engines and the development of a (work in progress) KMS driver for this hardware.

This talk provides an update on the lima driver progress of the past year. It will cover the work done on providing a Mesa driver for the Mali M family (M200/M400), and it will describe the current status of the reverse engineering work on the Mali T-series GPUs.

Like Vivante, ARMs Mali GPU is used only as an IP block in mix-n-match ARM based SoCs. This poses some specific challenges for graphics driver development. Then there is the unique design of the Mali M series GPUs and of ARMs kernel driver which has some further repercussions on the design of the mesa driver. The current working state of the Lima Mesa driver will be demonstrated and some of its design decisions and limitations will be explained.

To finish off, the status of the initial work on the Tamil driver, the future open source driver for Mali T-series (T6xx/T7xx) GPUs, will be described.

Open source 3D drivers for the ARM space are finally happening. This talk will cover the projects tackling the arduous, but highly pressing, tasks of creating these drivers, the current status of those projects, and the handful of highly dedicated and determined individuals behind them.

When the Lima driver was presented at last years FOSDEM, it was a game changing moment. Before this reverse engineering project for the highly popular ARM Mali 200/400 GPUs was announced, the open source graphics driver world was fully focused on the three x86 market leaders only, and the huge ARM market was being completely ignored (from a graphics driver point of view). The Lima driver fundamentally changed this, and now open ARM graphics drivers are a hot topic, and several people have taken it upon themselves to follow the Lima example. While individual projects are of course in different stages of completeness, and few are directly useful at this point, they have made this goal attainable. They will be enabling proper open source operating system on what is now ubiquitous hardware, and they have already changed the perception and attitude of graphics vendors for ARM towards their main markets.

This talk will cover several open source graphics driver projects for several ARM GPUs:

• ARM's own Mali with the Lima driver, and some of its developers: Luc Verhaegen, Connor Abbott (present), and Ben Brewer.
• The Qualcomm Adreno with the freedreno driver, and its main developer Rob Clark (present).
• The Nvidia Tegra, and its principal developer of the open source 3D driver for it; Erik Faye-Lund (present).
• Vivante GC range: Wladimir J. Van Der Laan.
• Broadcoms Videocore.
• Imaginations PowerVR.

This talk will finish with a demo round of the current capabilities of the Lima driver on a proper GNU/Linux system. Some time has been reserved in the X.org DevRoom for further demos and talks by the other open ARM GPU developers.

While everything is pretty much said and done on the x86 graphics front, and all the players have taken their respective positions and stick by it (despite ones best efforts), nothing has been done for the ARM world, even with the massive market penetration the linux and ARM combination currently has. The Mali is ARM's own GPU that is rapidly gaining traction. The most popular high end android smartphone so far is Samsung's Galaxy S2. The Mali-400 present in the Exynos SoC of the Galaxy S2 has been leader of the benchmarks for quite a bit. Besides the exynos, Mali is present in a rapidly growing number of SoCs, including telechips, allwinner, amlogic, realtek, VIA, ... The OpenGLES2.0 capable (and thus with separate vertex and fragment shaders) Mali is a highly clean design, and, of all the possible ARM GPUs, the perfect candidate for a free software driver. This talk will explain the rationale behind this project, the methodology used, the current status and the future direction. At the end, the current functionality (which is rapidly growing) will be demoed on both Mali-200 and Mali-400 based hardware. It will kick off a new era for free software graphics driver development.