Imagination Posts Original Driver Code For PowerVR Series 1 GPUs As Open-Source

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Imagination Posts Original Driver Code For PowerVR Series 1 GPUs As Open-Source

In addition to Imagination working on a open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for their newest graphics IP within Mesa, Imagination Technologies has also decided to go back and publish their original PowerVR Series 1 macOS/Windows driver as open-source...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerVR-Series-1-Open-Source

[uid313]

Imagination Technologies releasing open source! Hell has frozen over!

[pacolvr]

Too late, who wants that?

[coder111]

Um, I think I just saw a pig fly overhead?

On a more serious note, AFAIK PowerVR is still used in mobile/embedded SoCs, hopefully this can be used to support those. MediaTek, Allwinner, Rockchip chips.

[V1tol]

I thought they would post Cedarview GPU driver since there are still tons of devices using those Atom CPUs. Nice move to become "opensource friendly" and do literally nothing useful at the same time.

[ArthurBorsboom]

Still having a gma500 waiting for some love...

[Myownfriend]

They're literally working on adding open source drivers for their Rogue and newer GPUs into Mesa. That's pretty fuckin open source friendly.

Just because there isn't much utility these days to having the source code for their original GPU drivers, it doesn't mean this isn't a welcome move.

[c117152]

I thought they would post Cedarview GPU driver since there are still tons of devices using those Atom CPUs. Nice move to become "opensource friendly" and do literally nothing useful at the same time.

Stuff that was licensed to 3rd parties is probably the hardest to FOSS it might require their approval.

Anyhow, series1 is pretty close to series2 which was used in a few consoles so the emulators might benefit from looking into it.

[libv]

This is for retro hw only, 1996-1997 pci add in card, competing with the voodoo1/2, and rendition verite.

Now my corona lockdown project is totally moot. I needed something to keep my sanity but also something that i could stop working on at any time. I was pretty close with finally having found the buffers allocated in system memory, and thus 1d of actual code away from having replay of captures, but then omicron swamped the kindergarten and the project fell to the wayside again. It would have been the perfect troll though if they had been a few weeks later. With the release of the rogue code it was a cointoss whether i would write up the code to display a triangle still or to just let it be. Now it is totally pointless

Them releasing code for the PCX1/PCX2 is very cool indeed. I will hand them my mingw32 build system for the sgl demos ASAP.

[schmidtbag]

On a more serious note, AFAIK PowerVR is still used in mobile/embedded SoCs, hopefully this can be used to support those. MediaTek, Allwinner, Rockchip chips.

This series is so old that I'm sure there's no practical relation between it and the architectures found in ARM chips. That would be like Nvidia releasing the source code for the Riva TNT and somehow using that to figure out how to make open source Ampere drivers (or really, any GPU Nvidia made within the past decade).