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by caskstrength 1760 days ago
> If they can reverse engineer a whole undocumented display controller and GPU

Who says they reverse engineered whole of it? Making it display images is easier compared to making it work fast, support video decode, power saving, etc. Nouveau has been around for long time and never transitioned from former to latter state.

> then a fingerprint scanner is easy.

Yes, but it is not the point I was making.

> The barriers to these 'minor' things is motivated people to do it, not anything technical. This is something that can be helped with money.

I've been working on Linux kernel for some time now and I stand by my opinion that the main barrier to do it is technical. You can disagree though.
1 comments
marcan_42 1760 days ago
Nouveau has a problem with nonredistributable firmware. We don't have that problem because Apple distributes their firmware themselves and it gets loaded before Linux boots. I already put together a prototype installer that deals with the whole firmware situation for users.

I've been porting Linux to undocumented platforms for 10 years and the main barrier to getting it polished is motivational, not technical. It's precisely the hard problems that motivate people.

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caskstrength 1760 days ago
Okay, Hector, so assuming your Patreon reaches 100% when can we expect to have Linux working on M1 with similar performance, battery life and hardware video decoding in mplayer and Firefox?
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marcan_42 1760 days ago
There's no way to make hard promises about reverse engineering projects, but if you want an educated guess: basic accelerated graphics by the end of this year, and polish to the level of proper sleep states/PM/video decode and such by the end of 2022.
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caskstrength 1760 days ago
> There's no way to make hard promises about reverse engineering projects, but if you want an educated guess: basic accelerated graphics by the end of this year, and polish to the level of proper sleep states/PM/video decode and such by the end of 2022.

Thanks for the honest response. IMO you are being _extremely_ optimistic, but I would be glad to be proved wrong on this one.

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