The LibreSOC Project is a hybrid 3D CPU, GPU and VPU, designed for use in mass-volume products such as smartphones netbooks tablets and Industrial SBC IoT. As such, user trust and reduced product development costs are both equally important. Both these goal are achieved by providing full source right to the bedrock (Hardware HDL, bootloader, drivers, everything) and deploying strict transparent "Libre" development criteria. The project has EUR 350,000 funding from NLnet under their PET Programme and is actively seeking developers.
Analysis of SoCs (system-on-a-chip) used for embedded, mobile and IoT shows a decade-long disturbing persistent trend that is almost 100% without exception across hundreds of integrated processors: not a single recent SoC with modern performance in the past 10 years can be used 100% effectively without at least one closed source driver. The choices for developers and end-users alike is very stark: go without the GPU, or without the VPU, or without some key critical functionality that would penalise performance or business effectiveness entirely, or compromise on integrity and end-user trust, and reduce product reliability by delivering closed source binary-only drivers.
Even the highly-regarded Freescale/NXP iMX.6 which uses Etnaviv for the GPU, and has a 19-year Long-Term Supply committment, is still burdened by closed source 3rd party binary-only drivers for the VPU. Huge multi-man-year efforts consuming precious FOSS engineer resources that could be productively deployed elsewhere are wasted on reverse-engineering these closed SoCs. |