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Chip maker NVIDIA and the open source community have a shaky relationship at the moment. Linux founder Linus Torvalds cause a bit of a stir recently by using a bit of foul language toward NVIDIA in a public forum.

But now NVIDIA says it’s committed to open source, and the company has promised to release some documentation that will help open source developers work with NVIDIA’s Tegra processors.

Tegra chips are ARM-based processors with NVIDIA’s multi-core graphics processors. The plans is to release documentation regarding the 2D graphics engine, and there’s a chance 3D graphics documentation will follow.

NVIDIA Tegra processors are pretty widely used in smartphones and tablets that run Google Android, and at least a few upcoming Windows RT tablets also use Tegra 3 chips.

This is all pretty preliminary stuff at the moment, but if NVIDIA follows through on its promises to release this sort of documentation, it could be easier to port other operating systems including Linux distributions designed for desktop or mobile devices.

via Phoronix