Have you been hamstrung by the limitations of vendor provided binary blobs for GPU drivers in your ARM-based embedded systems? How about having access to open-source embedded Linux graphics drivers to write your own graphics applications? If so, this downloadable new whitepaper from Inforce Computing might be helpful.
As you may know, Qualcomm Snapdragon applications processors have a powerful and in-built high-performance Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerating 2D and 3D graphics-intensive applications. In modern embedded system user interfaces, graphics is increasingly becoming important. Having access to an open source graphics driver enables generation of new widgets, new features, etc., and allows developers to recompile it.
Inforce Computing ships Qualcomm Snapdragon powered hardware compute platforms running Linux OS. All Inforce Linux OS releases support the Qualcomm Adreno GPUs (3XX, 4XX) and they are
powered by the open source freedreno Mesa/Gallium GPU driver. No proprietary binary blobs or porting to OpenGLES is required.
This whitepaper describes how to enable OpenGL APIs on the
Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 805 based Inforce 64XX and 65XX compute platforms (Adreno 320 and Adreno 420 GPUs respectively) with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Linux drivers.
Here's a full lecture from the author of freedreno, Rob Clark on enabling the FOSS graphics drivers on the Inforce 6540 and Inforce 6410Plus SBCs:
The
Inforce 6410Plus Single Board Computer (SBC) is based on the Snapdragon 600E processor (APQ8064/APQ8064E) from Qualcomm. Inforce 6410Plus is the next generation enhanced version of the versatile and time-tested Inforce 6410 SBC. The product-ready platform of Inforce 6410Plus comes in an ultra-small Pico-ITX form factor (slightly larger than a credit card) suitable for a multitude of embedded designs. The plug-and-play Inforce 6410Plus SBC provides product developers instant access to the rich I/O and connectivity of the well proven and quad-core processing power of the Snapdragon 600E SoC. New features such as a short profile of just 16mm, GPS, support for dual-MIPI-DSI displays, and dual-MIPI-CSI cameras provide an ideal choice for a variety of unique embedded Android and Linux based applications in:
- Robotics and drones (unmanned aerial vehicles)
- Smart office/collaboration/videoconferencing
- Medical imaging systems
- Wearable hands-free computing
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