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- Embed this notice@blenderdumbass @Linux4Everyone >I heard somebody is trying to make 100% libre GPUs which would be amazing.
That's not really possible currently.
With a fast enough FGPA that has enough LUTs, you could run a free GPU hardware design with acceptable performance, but currently there is no really fast FGPA that is programmable in freedom - only the iCE40 line is really supported, which is designed more low power consumption over performance, plus there is limited support for some Xilinx FGPAs, but only for C code and not verilog.
It is possible to use nvidia GPUs up to the 700 series in freedom, as nouveau has free peripheral software for those cards - too bad the cards come with a nonfree VBIOS.
Intel integrated graphics up to a certain point works without any proprietary peripheral software or VBIOS and coreboot has free init+EDID for those.
coreboot has free init for ASpeed GPUs, unfortunately there is still no EDID support, so you get little better than 480p and I believe no 3D accel - but that seems just to be a driver config issue.
The radeonsi driver modified to not load proprietary software can make radeon and amd cards show a native resolution framebuffer, but there's still a proprietary VBIOS and there is no 3D accel.
>Though they would probably not run on x86 systems. Only PowerPC and stuff.
GPUs don't really care about what architecture the CPU runs - only that there's something that can talk its language over the bus.
If a GPU based off a free hardware design was designed to use PCIe, then it'll work in any computer that implements PCIe.
Taking a guess, I presume that graphics processor design is to make part of a PowerPC SoC and therefore is designed around internal SoC wiring for communication - but the design could possibly be modified to use PCIe instead.