Hi Tony,
Am 13.02.2019 um 01:41 schrieb Tony Lindgren tony@atomide.com:
Hi,
- Philipp Rossak embed3d@gmail.com [190212 22:25]:
I'm looking now into that PVR SGX driver since a while. I already reworked that old "opensource" driver to work with a quite new kernel (4.16 or 4.17) [But that code got lost]. For the sunxi devices this was only a short coding session to get that running. For OMAP this might be easier/faster since the general linux situation is better.
So a git repo that works for omaps and sunxi would be a good start then :)
I'm not sure if we are able to provide a generic driver since there are different userspace versions that are only compatible with their own kernel driver. Not all compile flags for the kernel driver work with all userspace lib versions, at least on sunxi. Be aware that there are also different versions of those GPU ip cores and all have different features and bug fixes.
No doubt it's a mess.. I'm only suggesting a generic driver that manages standard Linux resources like regulators, clocks and interrupts and provides 2d acceleration for sgx540 based on what we already have at drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/accel_2d.c. The idea being that it might then also make dealing with the rest of the sgx blobs a bit easier hopefully.
Well, ok.
So you suggest that we e.g. take the omap SoC support in
http://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-kernel.git;a=tree;f=drivers/staging/pvr/1....
and make an "eurasia_km / services4 / system / generic" out of it using the 2d functions?
Please take a look into especially sysconfig.c and SysInitialise() which does the lion's share of initialization if it can be rewritten to become generic.
If you reach a good state with that driver, I can try to port that to sunxi. Is there any good/cheap OMAP4/5 Devboard you can recommend?
Hmm so the n900 folks have the sgx blobs working with recent mainline kernels for sgx530 I believe, and Nikolaus is close to having the sgx blobs working for sgx540.
Also for sgx530 with recent kernel. The blobs itself are working, it is just missing code to tell the SGX module where the framebuffer is located in virtual memory.
I may not be aware of the current status though.
For a devboard with sgx540, you should be able to find one for few tens of units for a used pandaboard-es for example or somebody here might even have an old one to donate. If you feel like playing with a phone, droid 4 xt894 is somewhat usable with mainline kernels with pending patches for LCD and modem, no idea what the sgx540 status on it might be. Pyra handheld is not yet available except for prototypes. And then on beagleboard-x15 there's sgx544, and beaglebone has sgx530 FYI so that might not help if you need sgx540.
Don't expect any support from TI or IMG. TI can't support a project like this, since they don't own the code and IMG is not willing to support.
Yeah that we've seen already over past 10 or so years :)
An other big issue is the leaked SGX source code [1]. So I think it would be better to start a clean room reverse engineering project. I'm already working on that.
OK so we're discussing at least three projects then:
- A git repo that allows sgx blobs to work for various
SoCs with current mainline kernels
Yes.
- A generic 2d sgx540 driver based on existing mainline
kernel drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/accel_2d.c
May be needed or not.
- Your reverse engineering project that might help
with figuring out how things are supposed to work
IMHO a completely separate project.
Basically there is a strict layering:
L4 user-space libraries L3 SGX firmware L2 SGX firmware loader L1 SoC glue (clock, reset, dma, virtual memory, ...)
I am mainly considering L1 here and fixing L2. L1 is SoC specific of course and L2 needs Linux-release specific patches.
L2-L4 depend on SGX version.
L2 contains a lot of #ifdef that depend on SGX530/540/544 and even more.
Reverse engineering addresses L3 and L4.
Of course if will be is successful it might become possible to improve the whole L1-L4 stack, but that is another 10 years in the future :)
Since it is such a big task, I would propose to start with something close to working (some TI/IMG DDK) and improve on that instead of starting with parts from scratch.
BR, Nikolaus