Current open source status of SGX544-MP2?


hlidegp2x

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Sep 8, 2007
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Any change since 2013?
SGX 5xx series, by Imagination : used within the OMAP4 line of processors as well as in other products (including some Intel APUs). No spec, no driver source, binary blob only. The same goes for other Imagination GPU - including the recent 543 MP4+ (PS Vita). No good news for the 6xx series. Texas Instrument was trying to negotiate with Imagination to release some source code but that discussion most likely failed (TI announced they will not make any other CPU, meaning that Imagination has no incentive to free their source code).
 
Wasn't PowerVR GPU drivers leaked a while ago, essentially dooming any project of making open source drivers for them?
 
you'd just need to essentially do what was done to make IBM PC BIOS clones... :p Blind Reverse Engineer using 3rd parties.
 
As far as I know, the driver by itself should be open source. Linux is quite monolithic, thus you need to actually add to code to the source tree. The blob is "only" the openGL implementation (which talks with the open source driver).
The other problem would be that the implementation of the driver might be bound to a limited set of kernel versions, because there are regularly changes in the kernel interface.
 
It's unlikely there'll be any real work on this now unless it happens to come from the Pyra community. IMG's Series 5XT is old technology now, it has long since been superseded by Series 6 and higher which are totally different GPU architectures. And while Series 5XT was used in big devices like iPhone/iPad and PSVita it was never really very big in platforms where custom drivers could easily be used.
 
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