• FOSDEM 2015
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• Schedule
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• Speakers
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• Luc Verhaegen

Luc has been writing open source graphics drivers since 2003 and has a track-record of doing things that are at first deemed impossible or even wrong, yet later become the norm.

Luc paved the way for algorithmic, bios-free mode setting with his work on VIAs Unichrome, which spawned many modern display driver development paradigms (and even the term mode-setting itself). By being the first to add native display support to Coreboot he made the first commercial motherboard with complete coreboot support possible.

At SuSE, together with Egbert Eich and Matthias Hopf, he proved to AMD that a free and maintainable driver could be created for Radeon hardware, despite ATIs best attempts to hamper this. Later on, he demonstrated the feasibility and flexibility of integrated graphics driver stacks and, as a follow-up, building DRI drivers externally to the still very monolithic Mesa, and even a rudimentary Mesa SDK. While at Nokia, he worked on improving the debugging infrastructure for the PowerVR GPU used in the Nokia N9, with the intention of making Nokias Meego/Maemo project less directly dependent on Imaginations own driver and support.

At FOSDEM2012 he presented a reverse engineered graphics driver for the ARM Mali GPUs, the first project to seriously create an open source GPU driver for the ARM space. The lima driver inspired a few like-minded individuals to tackle similarly daunting tasks and now most major ARM GPUs have open source graphics drivers in various stages of completeness. His intervention on the initial Broadcom "graphics driver release" triggered the proper open source graphics driver strategy followed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation today.

Due to his work on his lima driver, he became a regular contributor to the linux-sunxi project, the vibrant community that has gathered behind Allwinner SoCs, and Luc is now trying to balance his time between those two projects while scraping together a living as a consultant.

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