The forbidden topic: Glamo OpenGL

Jacob Peterson jacobp at iastate.edu
Fri Nov 14 14:34:34 CET 2008


Thank you for the response Wolfgang.

The current FreeRunner is already starting to show its potential as a
kick-ass phone and defiantly has me excited to see what future version can
offer, but it is sad to see the user interface will never be able to support
smooth animations or run any applications that require more that a couple
simple moving objects without 3D acceleration support for the Glamo.  What
started me think of this is running Android on the FreeRunner.  I noticed
that it ran reasonably well, but if it had just a little extra help from the
3D accelerator it would run really well, the same goes for every other UI
and application for the phone.

I will continue to support Openmoko and I am eagerly awaiting future
hardware that do offer proper 3D support, but until then I will try and get
all I can out of what is available.

-Jacob

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Wolfgang Spraul <wolfgang at openmoko.com>wrote:

> Jacob,
> Glamo is not a forbidden topic.
>
> Openmoko actually has learnt a lot from this. First we have learnt to
> not trust high-level promises as much as before.
> In fact I would go as far as saying that going forward, we will not
> trust any promises about 'we will open this up later' anymore.
> Either it's open and documented at the time we make the decision to
> use those chips, or we look elsewhere.
> I believe that's what our customers want.
>
> We have a long way to go to come out with kick-ass open phone
> hardware, but if our community doesn't loose faith and continues to do
> development together with us, we'll get there. The momentum we have
> built with the Freerunner is awesome. Please continue to buy
> Freerunners and to develop for it, same is happening internally. The
> next phones will build on top of the free platform we have built
> together, the technology investment will carry over.
>
> Having said that, if someone wants to seriously develop for the glamo,
> please get in touch with me and we will find a legally correct way to
> extend the smedia documentation to you.
> In fact we have done that in a few cases before already, but I'm not
> sure how much actual codes have come out of that. I think very
> little ;-)
> So we need some really serious coders that don't mind a tough challenge.
>
> Best Regards,
> Wolfgang
>
> On Nov 14, 2008, at 6:48 AM, Jacob Peterson wrote:
>
> > Sorry to drag this old, over discussed topic up again.  However, I
> > am concerned that if action is not taken soon then all GTA02 owners
> > will be left without any real chance to ever get anything in the way
> > of OpenGL support.  So I ask the question, what is Openmoko's
> > position on writing an OpenGL driver for the Glamo chip or at least
> > aiding developers with some form of documentation?
> >
> > I have read speculation that it may be possible to do something such
> > as rewrite the documents to get around the NDA.  Since it seems
> > rather clear that SMedia has no intention to release the documents
> > to anyone else under NDA, it is solely up to Openmoko to write the
> > driver or at least aid any community members with the ability to
> > write such a driver.
> >
> > Hopefully there is something that can be done, or better yet,
> > something is currently being done on this.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Jacob
> > _______________________________________________
> > Openmoko community mailing list
> > community at lists.openmoko.org
> > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>
>
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