Imagination Releases Full ISA Documentation For PowerVR Rogue GPUs

[TeamBlackFox]

Great news!

Now they need to simply release documentation to most of the GPUs they have, as that will allow more open source development such as BSD to target those platforms.

[Ibidem]

This is a solid dev board for developers targeting MIPS CPUs.

OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 drivers are working. I have been running a few non-optimized games (Chromium BSU, OpenArena, etc.) on it to test it out.

We will make an official announcement soon.

The drivers for video decode acceleration (MPEG-2, H.264, etc.) will be free and openly available to everyone; the graphics drivers will remain closed.

Thanks for the response. I'm interested in getting one, and that bit about video decode is better news than I'd hoped for.
I do have a few more questions, though:
-I saw (looking through the lists) that someone's been working on a DRM driver; am I correct in guessing that this has KMS and framebuffer emulation, and could be used with xorg-video-modesetting or xfbdev?

-Will the drivers for video decode require a proprietary kernel driver? (I would assume not, but I've seen numerous oddball configurations.)

-Do the drivers for video decode require the graphics userspace? (Could I use an unaccelerated X server with accelerated video decode?)

-Does the userspace graphics driver work with the DRM driver?
If not, what APIs would the other kernel driver support?
(Would it support framebuffer? KMS?)

And finally, if I port Alpine Linux, is there a remote prospect of getting the graphics userspace driver ported to run on it?
Alpine Linux uses musl as libc, and has a standard X.org stack.
(I'm guessing that the answer is something like "only if there's a high enough demand.")

[jhogan]

Thanks for the response. I'm interested in getting one, and that bit about video decode is better news than I'd hoped for.
I do have a few more questions, though:
-I saw (looking through the lists) that someone's been working on a DRM driver; am I correct in guessing that this has KMS and framebuffer emulation, and could be used with xorg-video-modesetting or xfbdev?

yes, i believe so

-Will the drivers for video decode require a proprietary kernel driver? (I would assume not, but I've seen numerous oddball configurations.)

No.
You might find this useful:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mips-creator-ci20/C003_TNUqsw

-Do the drivers for video decode require the graphics userspace? (Could I use an unaccelerated X server with accelerated video decode?)

Yes, I believe so. It's independent hardware.

-Does the userspace graphics driver work with the DRM driver?
If not, what APIs would the other kernel driver support?
(Would it support framebuffer? KMS?)

Yes, I believe so