Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Gracana 3829 days ago
What's the open source driver situation like for these things? Is it worth supporting nvidia by buying one of these, or are they likely to crack down on developers to keep this thing closed? It is an awfully interesting device, but I'd hate to buy one and find I could only really use it as an android device, especially after reading reviews about that lackluster functionality.
1 comments
cvs268 3829 days ago
NVIDIA has opensource Linux support for its SoCs in the form of L4T - Linux for Tegra.

Also checkout Tegra Shield Tablet running Ubuntu natively. http://forum.xda-developers.com/shield-tablet/development/ru...

link
Gracana 3829 days ago
Wikipedia says L4T contains proprietary drivers, but nvidia's having a third party make experimental open source drivers for mainline linux. Is that information out of date? The sources are from 2012 and very well could be. I'm trying to look for info but there's a lot of uninformative crap out there.
link
cvs268 3829 days ago
AFAIK, in the above, the bit about experimental open-source drivers for mainline Linux is the latest news update.

Note that this last bit proprietary blob is only the low-level GPU driver. Linux device-drivers of the other controllers of the Tegra X1 SoC already appear to be available in source form at https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tegra/linux.git... (search for 'Tegra X1' or 'T210' or 'Tegra 210').

Also https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra contains source-code(with supporting documentation) for the non-kernel parts like for boot-loader(u-boot), OpenCV, OpenGL, X11, Gstreamer and even CUDA on Tegra X1.

link
Gracana 3829 days ago
That's cool. And very promising. I wonder why they decided to do it this way for the tegra project, and if that approach will spread.
link
Quintus23M 3829 days ago
I think, Nvidia is well organised and you'll get a ton of developer informations for the Tegra DevKits on their website and forums. The community is pretty active and helpful as well.

They provide a lot of drivers for CUDA and the DevKit boards, namely the Jetson TK1 and Jetson TX1. And some of the users also reported that the Shield TV has a lot in common with the TX1 boards.

link