The Linux drive is not the same thing as the Symbian driver.

Sorry, I forgot that the phones run Symbian OS. Maybe when Symbian opensource is released, we will get hardware acceleration..

Yes, in 2011. . . .

Symbian being open source does not mean we will have open source Symbian drivers.
The IP does not belong to Nokia to open source and is up to the IP holder to make that decision.

Maybe I was making bad inferences, but I assumed the instability was largely a consequence of the convolutions needed to transfer from the 640x480 (max) framebuffer the powerVR could render to, out to the normal framebuffer, and then out to the Epson chip by normal means. I haven't done much research, and it may be that those convolutions aren't necessary at all, or that they're not the issue behind the instability.

Yeah, that would be awesome. Then I'd probably be doing less speculation. And maybe being wrong less as a result.

derhorst,
I understand your frustration, I have said the same things directly to nokia employees and do believe if it reaches the right people may actually be a deciding factor.

However, it is not quite the same thing for 2 reasons:
The other released N Series devices running powervr use the Symbian operating system, this is not compatible with Linux.

And the second larger reason is that phones are using (we think) the actual video out from the omap2420 to drive their displays directly, whereas the video display on our tablets is driven from an external LCD controller chip.

Having said that, if there was a Symbian binary driver available for this specific chip I would be interested to see if a compatability wrapper could be produced to make use of the Symbian driver in linux.
I believe a similar process allows desktop linux to use Windows network drivers.

So, your mission: find the correct symbian drivers and lets see what we can do

@Icuk
The idea is very interesting
I've no clue about programming and OS, but if a N8x0 user with more knowledge has got an omap 2420 phone, he/she could probably extract the driver from the device..

Certainly let's find some Symbian drivers and reverse engineer them, I think that will be easier that a wrapper script (bear in mind that the only driver we have atm is for the OMAP2430 (not the 2420).

You'll also, almost certainly find, that more OMAP chipsets are sold to run Symbian than Linux, this may indicate why this driver is better developed/more stable than the Linux one.

While Symbian drivers may be a different animal than linux drivers, the instructions given to the chipset is the same. It's not like the chipset knows what the OS is and uses a different set of instructions to process graphics. As an example, the b43 project which uses the firmware extracted from windows drivers and allows it to be loaded into linux via wrapper to allow Broadcom wireless chipsets to be used.

But I recall Nokia devs just plainly saying that they didn't see a point in paying for the drivers, so I stand by my accusations that they were just too cheap to pay for the license.

People are so short-sighted with money sometimes, it never ceases to amaze me. Especially with giant corporations who will pinch pennies in the short-run, but then have to pay through the nose in the long-run because they cut a corner.

Er, where? The only word about PowerVR drivers was from LinuxTag, and money wasn't a significant part of the discussion there (as far as I've come to understand, anyway).