PowerVR Driver Gets New Site, Little Progress

The Free Software Fondation has had a high priority project to reverse-engineer the PowerVR SGX GPU and to write an open-source 3D driver around this popular Imagination graphics processor more than a year.

While it's been a high-priority project and Imagination PowerVR SGX graphics processors are very common among ARM devices (and Intel's current Atom processors), the FSF-approved project hasn't been advancing.

The only open-source PowerVR driver news to report so far this summer is that they have a new Wiki. You can find the new PowerVR driver web-site at powervr.gnu.org.ve, but it's not incredibly exciting. There's just one page right now and the Wiki doesn't have a whole lot of information. It's not much more information compared to the earlier Wiki on LibrePlanet.

The only reported work that's been done is reverse-engineering some USSE opcodes, but that's it, and that's been completed for more than one year.

The project has also setup a powervr-devel mailing list, but again, there isn't much information. There's no Git repository yet since there isn't any actual driver.

This lack of progress comes at a time where reverse-engineering and driver-writing by other individual programmers for other GPUs is going much better. See Major Open-Source ARM Announcement Coming for more information and a current overview of these open-source ARM graphics efforts.