Linux Users Might See A PowerVR Holiday Surprise

[slamtonio]

Darn. Thanks for dashing my hopes. I going go back to working with a newer kernel b/c I hear there is better support for GMA500, unfortunately it breaks something else on my system. Maybe that will be easier to fix. Much appreciated for the response.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Any new news on this driver being released?

Unfortunately this "surprise" is not a driver and this code is unrelated to PowerVR: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTI0MzU

[slamtonio]

Any new news on this driver being released? I've been working with the GMA500 FBDEV driver developed by Alan Cox on CentOS 6.3 (3.4.13 kernel) and it works well, but I can't control brightness and was hoping this new driver would help.

[cwabbott]

How about, you know, GMA500 and its many descendants? :P But even if they did release a reference driver for that, it's doubtful if it would be of much use, given that Alan Cox's work on it entirely from bits and pieces of documentation is already fairly decent. Unless their reference driver also comes with extra documentation...

Actually, it would be useful. Alan's driver is for the display and (possibly, idk if it's supported yet) 2D bits, which are entirely separate from the 3D (PowerVR) bits.

[droidhacker]

There's still Via and SiS but maybe they'll fade into irrelevance like 3dfx.

Huh? nvidia == (for the most part) 3dfx. It didn't fade, it got consumed.

[speculatrix]

I am really hoping for a GMA500 drive with reasonable 2D acceleration so as to revive my old Fujitsu UMPC.

people will of course say that I should never have bought a GMA500 based netbook-like UMPC in the first place but it was a compromise I was willing to take, and I resent having to fall back to Windows on it for good media playback.

[GreatEmerald]

PS Anyone know about PowerVR chips that are used in FLOSS OS other than Android?

How about, you know, GMA500 and its many descendants? :P But even if they did release a reference driver for that, it's doubtful if it would be of much use, given that Alan Cox's work on it entirely from bits and pieces of documentation is already fairly decent. Unless their reference driver also comes with extra documentation...

[Ibidem]

There's also (old) Linux/X11 on Atom chips with PowerVR gfx.

iOS: barely open, and apple is decidedly not open about the gfx part of the stack.
Android: Could be.
*BSD: I don't think there's any sort of _market_ that's asking for ARM BSD systems with a fully open-source EGL/ OpenGL ES stack...
Windows 8: Since when did MS want FOSS drivers? And how do they fit with Secure Boot?
WinCE: Possible (witness AMD), but I doubt that they'd drive the decision to start with.

PowerVR has lost Intel over their drivers, so I'd imagine they would rather not lose the droid market.

[mcirsta]

I'll believe it when I see it .... show me the code

[przemoli]

1) We do not know for which OS this reference driver will be. (PowerVR chips are used in iOS, and Andi but where else?)
2) We do not know for which CHIPS this reference driver will be.
3) We do not know for which USER SPACE LIBS this reference driver will be.
4) We do not know how much of hw it will USE (and wich will still be emulated in CPU or if at all).
5) We do not know how much of actual driver IS CODED IN FIRMWAREaq.

Lots of unknown.
PS Anyone know about PowerVR chips that are used in FLOSS OS other than Android?
PSPS Anyone know what name is proper for driver in firmware? OS driver vs hardware driver? OS driver vs firmware driver?