[Xf86-video-armsoc] ARMSOC X11 plugin issues

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 13:24:21 +0100
Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 4 April 2016 at 11:45, Siarhei Siamashka <siarhei.siamashka at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This really must be something new, because I don't remember anything
> > like this when skimming through the EULA back in 2013. Making the EULA
> > even more restrictive seems to contradict with the promise of Jem
> > Davies to provide legally redistributable mali binary drivers that
> > we had in 2014:
> >
> >     http://anandtech.com/comments/8226/ask-the-experts-arm-fellow-jem-davies-answers-your-gpu-questions/409101
> >
> > Can anyone from ARM provide an update on this?  
> 
> Getting fairly off-topic now, but the Midgard (6xx/7xx/8xx) drivers
> are now redistributable.

Hi Daniel,

I'm not sure if this is really offtopic, because it is still related to
the interoperability with the X server after all.

Thanks for your comment. Sorry for a late reply, but I have just noticed
that the ARM Mali Utgard GPU User Space Drivers page now has the
r6p0-01rel0 release with an updated EULA, which is more permissive
compared to the previous r5p0-01rel0 release:

    http://malideveloper.arm.com/resources/drivers/arm-mali-utgard-gpu-user-space-drivers/

The page states that "A new and more permissive version was introduced
in January 2016 and all Midgard user-space drivers starting with r6p0
are now distributed under the new terms. The main changes are to allow
redistribution of the binaries under the same EULA, commercial use and
benchmarking. Please read the END_USER_LICENCE_AGREEMENT.txt document
included in the packages for the exact licencing terms."

There is obviously a minor mistake in this text, because it mentions
"Midgard" (most likely a copy-paste issue).

Anyway, it is good that the Utgard (Mali-400/450) binaries now got a
usable license after all these years. And the weird benchmark results
confidentiality clause has been also updated. Thanks to whoever finally
made this happen!

Still I wonder who is going to also provide binaries for the 32-bit
mode and for Mali-400 hardware (unless the userland binaries for
Mali-450 are fully backwards compatible). Also the X11 binaries are
still missing from the downloads page. Can ARM people comment on this?

Maxime, if you happen to have 32-bit redistributable userland
Mali-400 binaries, could you please share them with the others?
Maybe ARM people could even put them on their download page?

-- 
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka