Just a quick two cents...

I was looking around and doing a lot of research into this subject, and it appears that there are old linux PowerVR drivers....

http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/inside...vr-drivers.asp



From what I gather, it is an open source driver meant for the 2.4 kernel. It would take a bit of work to port to 2.6, but not a real problem.


The biggest problem I have is: Are they the RIGHT drivers? The copyright inside the source readme says 2003... so it can't be too old...


It's possible that these are the wrong drivers. If I understand things correctly, Kyro was their product before MBX.. So MBX was more of a rebranding than a complete different product? So these old drivers could be tweaked and updated?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#MBX

Anyone want to correct me/support me/kick me out of the discussion?

different model
different interface
different target
different mechanism

sorry, you get points for looking but if it was that easy we would have drivers by now


at the summit we heard small private mumblings about the 3d drivers but there has been nothing officially updated and as far as I am aware no drivers were on show anywhere.

beta drivers and community developer involvement hinted at on the driver justification discussion page has so far turned to nothing.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Talkrivers_justification

^^^ the smiley here is unintentional.

Yeah that's what I figured... I read all 15 pages of this thread yesterday.... I figured it couldn't be that easy....

But somehow I think those drivers could still be used as a base for reverse engineering..... but my RE days are over

I have 2.4.x drivers for the omap2430, however it's not trivial to port them, mainly as they need to be reverse engineered and are also for a slightly different chipset.

It's a better use of my time (and others') to wait and see if we do eventually get drivers to go along with Fremantle (which will probably need them). If not, we can look again at doing some reverse engineering.

What's the time frame we're looking at? I'm afraid we may be waiting forever :-/

Fremantle's production release will, presumably, be concurrent with the N9xx hardware shipping. This presumed combo event is generally predicted for 2q/3q of 2009, but nobody who really knows can talk.

The roadmap gives some more short-term guidance, though; first alpha in December.

This all sounds good, but what I'm afraid is that even if we do get drivers with Fremantle, they won't be backwards compatible with current hardware (n800/810).

Omap 3 uses the SGX chipset instead of MBX. That makes sense, it's the new stuff. But it won't help us! We'll still have to reverse engineer something...

They wont be, OMAP3 drivers have absolutely nothing to do with OMAP2 drivers.

Unless Nokia pulls an FremantleHE with existing, closed, not-up-to-snuff MBX drivers (which they have, but haven't released) to keep Fremantle about.

Then again, any FremantleHE could also use software rendering, if the actual necessary OpenGL stuff for the desktop environment is(/can be made) basic enough.

Mr. General: There is a DIFFERENT graphics chip on the Omap3 SoC than on the Omap2 SoC



FremantleHE would be interesting....


Edit: Actually, I think I misread your post GA. We agree on the same thing, right? I thought you were saying the opposite.