Imagination Appears To Be Working On An Open-Source PowerVR Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Imagination Appears To Be Working On An Open-Source PowerVR Driver

The latest talk is that Imagination Technologies may be developing an open-source Linux graphics driver for their PowerVR hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...R-Open-Chatter

[davidbepo]

hopefully we can see this driver soon, i am using a laptop with atom d2500 cpu and gma 3600 graphics and its slow because its running llvmpipe

[GreatEmerald]

hopefully we can see this driver soon, i am using a laptop with atom d2500 cpu and gma 3600 graphics and its slow because its running llvmpipe

And my GMA 600 tablet can't even turn off its own screen under Linux...

But whatever this is, I highly doubt it would be related to any of the older products, nor from the experience so far do I think it's worth being excited about...

[Drago]

I hope it is based on Mesa. If not then meh....

[uid313]

Hell is getting chilly...

[user82]

I hope it is based on Mesa. If not then meh....

I'd prefer it to work with Android

[Serafean]

I'd prefer it to work with Android

Mesa on Android is a thing Personaly I don't care about Android, so for me it's also mesa or meh.

[duby229]

Yeah, this coming from the company with absolutely the single worst product support policies evar!! It's almost as if they got together and decided to never support any product in any way for anyone. So stupid.

[hajj_3]

Yeah, this coming from the company with absolutely the single worst product support policies evar!! It's almost as if they got together and decided to never support any product in any way for anyone. So stupid.

Making an open source linux driver however would solve these problems as people can spot the bugs and possibly submit patches themselves. In february imagination announced a high end gpu (PowerVR GT7900: http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/power...nce-efficiency) which is faster than the nvidia 730M (laptop gpu). They want to get in to making gpu's for cheap consoles. More companies making chips for android devices and linux devices will use powervr if they had open source drivers as the public will contribute to them and fix bugs. The BRICS countries (brazil, russia, india, china and south africa) are creating their own chips instead of using x86 intel/amd chips the only open source gpu is intel but they don't licence the gpu, powervr do. Imagination could make quite a bit of money if they could sell their powervr gpu's to those countries. I am very hopeful about this. It could put some pressure on other mobile gpu vendors like arm's mali and qualcomm's adreno to open source their gpu drivers.

[duby229]

There is one thing Imagination will always remember to do, that's let you down. If you put your hope in them, they will make sure to violently crush it.

EDIT: If they ever do release an OSS driver, I'll be willing to put every dollar I have that they will simply release code a few times and nothing else. It will be with absolutely zero support.