The Linux foundation put out an offer to develop and maintain drivers for linux, for free, and in accordance to a company's NDS if needed, for any device a company wants. All said company has to do is provide some specs and a contact for a little Q&A. Even demo units are optional. It's a pretty sweet deal and you can read it here. I wonder if PowerVR is a ware of this? I think if we contacted them asking them to have the linux foundation make the driver for the PowerVR MBX it'd be hard for them to turn it down. I mean no cost and full NDA compliance. Make the offer as a petition and that might give it some more weight.

Is such an endeavor worth a shot???

Interesting, though it talks about NDAs my reading of it was that if companies will provide info then someone will write the code and add it to the kernel (presumably in source code form).

Presumably if the code were to be maintained by a community member under the NDA this might make continuity more difficult (though it would be better than nothing for sure!)

They already have linux driver for any business partner with $$ so they may not be interested in free (for any meaning of free) version. See also this post from "Len Kawell, CEO, Pepper Computer, Inc."
http://www.pepper.com/forums/showthr...=6154#post6154

Well, yes, at worst you'll get no reply or some polite 'thank you for your suggestion ...' refusal.

If you search a little you will find out why video performanceo even with the driverce would be far from perfect. Hint: Epson.

So? if you search a little, you will also find out why the repercussions of a framebuffer bandwidth limitation can be limited; pixel-doubling would be required to beat ~20 fps (because of pixel transfer costs), but all 3d-intensive software-rendered games need pixel-doubling to beat ~5 fps now (because of pixel computation costs), so it would still be a dramatic improvement for gaming. It could also enable some cool desktop/window manager related stuff, where low FPS won't be a killer.

I'm not saying video drivers are the holy grail, and gonna solve all our problems. I'm aware that the frambuffer has to be regularly and completely cleared and that puts a big damper on video, but having them would solve at least some problems and would most likely improve OpenGL performance. Better to have them than to not.

I think it's worth a go. If we could write up a paragraph or two explaining the Linux Foundation's offer and how it costs them nothing. Plus explain why we need the driver, and add a ton of sigs, it'd be hard for them to not at least notice and perhaps get the ball rolling one way or another. I'd be willing to set up and/or host the petition if someone else with more knowledge of the chip could help me write it up.

Just a new comment on this old thread;

Nokia just became a "gold sponsor" of the Linux Foundation. After the announcement, the Nokia guys were kinda, "um, you obviously haven't realized what this means yet"... perhaps this is one of the things we didn't get... they can now use the Linux foundation to release code with tricky licenses.

So, that means Nokia paid a $100,000 membership fee, thereby supporting folks like Linus who work full time on Linux software without having to punch a clock at a megacorp; increasing their influence in, and access to, Linux communities; and gaining voting rights for three Linux Foundation board seats.

I don't know about that. I can see that it puts them in a select group of serious corporate supporters of Linux and free software. Motorola's the only other "mobile phone" manufacturer at the Gold level, and the others at the Gold and Platinum levels are big names in more traditional computing. Nokia is conspicuous in the list, that's for certain.

Care to explain?

I saw it more as a devotion behind Linux kernel (and standard, underlying components like GNU) and the open source model. It is apparently worth for Nokia to support e.g. Linux kernel development and standardisation, but I'm not exactly sure what the Linux foundation has achieved or tries to achieve.

I think the original post in this thread does that.