SGX driver installer (beta)


What exactly do these drivers do and why are they all broken in there own ways?
 
These drivers drive the 3D chip in the Pandora; without them the Pandora doesn't know how to use the chip.
They are all broken in their own way since as they fix one thing they cause others to break... we can only try to find the least broken driver and work around the bugs since the drivers are closed source.
 
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I'd say they are broken because they are closed source, the IP's owner doesn't care much about this market segment, and the community may be too small to mount any successful reverse engineering effort (but I hope to be proven wrong on this one:)
 
Drivers seem so small, Are they really that hard to reverse engineer / hack etc? Sorry if that question is ridiculous, I just don't know much about this stuff. :)  
 
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Drivers seem so small, Are they really that hard to reverse engineer / hack etc? Sorry if that question is ridiculous, I just don't know much about this stuff. :)
What makes you think they're small? They're actually large and bloated, for example if you take libsrv_init.so, which the name implies is doing initialization only (small part of the puzzle), it has over 12000 ARM instructions that you would have to figure out what they're doing.

The GPU also has at least 2 completely custom CPUs inside of it with custom instruction sets that you'd need to figure out too, perhaps having to write disassemblers and other tools to be able to progress at all.
 
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^

Some people don't notice that a few MB can contain thousands of lines with instructions.

It's the size that makes people think: "It's jus a few MB, so why is it so hard to hack it".

Even if I know about that I also do that mistake.

I think nearly everyone who isn't a programmer somehow gets influenced by that "small" size compared to the GBs of space programs need today.

Get some MP3 files and it's bigger than the driver.

Few MB = nothing.

That's the way people think, or at least the one who don't know better.

I also don't know what's inside the dirver but I know what's inside peoples minds.

At least I study psychology.

Also I have to deal with people who have really NO idea of computers. You can't imagine how less some people know about the devices they use every day.

Enough lesson for today ;) .
 
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Actually right after I asked the question i realized it was a dumb one. :)
 
Why are these drivers closed source ? I thought all the hardware on op was "open".
 
Why are these drivers closed source ? I thought all the hardware on op was "open".
You thought wrong, Ti / Imagination Technologies have no plans of opening up their powervr SGX drivers. Also the Bluetooth and Wifi drivers are using a closed source binary blobs...


The Pandora is open in the sense you can develop what you want how you want it..  No app store approval process, special SDK nor locked down to a single OS.. etc...


However this isn't stopping anyone from developing their own drivers...
 
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I am having trouble running the pnd to install these drivers. Every time I try to run the pnd, it gives me this error message: "Mounting the PND failed. The application wont start. Please have a look at /tmp/pndrun_sgx_driver_installer.out". Here are the contents of that file:

ge=======================================================================================

PND : /media/mmcblk0p1/pandora/menu/sgx_drivers_r1.pnd
PND_FSTYPE : Squashfs
APPDATADIR : /media/mmcblk0p1/pandora/appdata/sgx_driver_installer
APPDD_FSTYPE : vfat
PND_CPUSPEED :
EXENAME : run.sh
ARGUMENTS :
=======================================================================================
[ START ]--- Mount the PND ----------
Mounting : mount -t squashfs -o ro "/dev/loop0" "/mnt/utmp/sgx_driver_installer"
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

WARNING : mount faild, re-tring
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

ERROR The PND File-system is not mounted !
+++++++
Loopback devices :
/dev/loop0: [b301]:157 (/media/mmcblk0p1/pandora/menu/sgx_drivers_r1.pnd)
Are mounted on :
For these Union :
ERROR: The Union File-system is not mounted !
+++++++
Loopback devices :
/dev/loop0: [b301]:157 (/media/mmcblk0p1/pandora/menu/sgx_drivers_r1.pnd)
Are mounted on :
For these Union :
[ FAILED]--- Mount the PND ----------
=======================================================================================
Return code is : 8
 
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