21 Jan 2011 lkcl   » (Master)

PowerVR

i'm looking up information about the PowerVR 3D SGX Engine in order to assist tomasz with his reverse-engineering project, http://code.google.com/p/gles6410.

there is... a great deal of shit and misinformation out there. one of the down-sides of google android is that the number of forums has exploded, with the number of misinformed opinions and the sheer number of AOL-esque "metooings" just completely overwhelming the actually useful contributions - such as tomasz' work.

it took forever to find the GLES6410 project. and no, tomasz' work is NOT restricted to just the S3C6410 - it is very very relevant for absolutely all of the PowerVR SGX Series, due to the architecture of PowerVR. all that the CPU manufacturers do is provide a subtly different "shim" to access the PowerVR's registers and interrupts - that's it. beyond that: once you have a GPL Linux Kernel "shim" driver which makes the access to those registers identical right across all hardware - be it OMAP, Samsung, iMX series from FreeScale or even Intel PPA (Poulsbo, whatever, i don't actually care) from that point on it's pretty much all the same.

i say "all the same" but there do exist subtle bugs in the hardware implementations, and also variations such as the number of parallel engines and various upgrades / versions but effectively yes, it's all the same.

that makes tomasz' work um... incredibly valuable, and i would very much appreciate it if people could spread the word, pitch in and help him out. PowerVR has a hell of a lot of momentum and a very large amount of market share: it's too important to leave it to imgtec to maybe release a Free Software Library in Q3 2011.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!