Hi,
I’m using Gentoo aarch64 which is working pretty well, and I would like to install the xorg driver, hoping for smooth 2D, video playback etc.
I downloaded the Tegra186_Linux_R28.1.0_aarch64.tbz2 archive, and ran the source_sync.sh script.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what to do next as the sources folder contains only empty folders.
Can someone help me ?
The hardware accelerated binaries are installed via the driver package’s “apply_binaries.sh” script. If you look at that script you’ll see the tar file the driver comes from. Note that everything from NVIDIA which talks directly to X (such as libGL.so) will be bound to a specific X ABI version. If your ABI matches, then it should work…if not, then you cannot use the binary drivers. I have not tried to build an outside version, so I don’t know which specific files would be needed other than the libGL.so.
I’ve seen this archive, but the nvidia_drv.so is already compiled.
I’d like to know how/where to find it’s source code.
Those files do not have source code available…thus the requirement of matching the X ABI they were compiled for.
Why isn’t the source code available ?
I don’t know…it’s internal to the direct access hardware driver, which is probably why.
Generally, hardware vendors who believe that they have significant hardware knowledge secrets that their competitors do not, will not release source code for their drivers, on the assumption that having access to the source code (which has comments, definitions, names, and so forth) will let someone analyze how the hardware “secret sauce” works.
Presumably, they are also somewhat concerned that someone who just has the source, but not access to the engineers who built the hardware, the schematics of the hardware, and the internal hardware documentation, might actually damage hardware by using it wrong. The support nightmare of that would potentially be pretty costly for a hardware vendor.
If you want driver sources, you can always try looking at the noveau driver, which is an open source driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, based, I think, on reverse engineering? I don’t know how close or far away that driver would be from working on the Jetson.