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nickar is offline nickar
2008-09-23 , 06:12
Posts: 16 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Sep 2008
#1
Hi All!!!
This is my first post, but it comes on steroids!!!
Is there anyone trying to reverse engineer the PowerVR GPU?
It would be great to unite forces for this, cause it is not an easy task.
I'm quite newbie in all this, but have a lot of will!

Some info i've collected from this forum (its not new, but it would be great to have it all in the same place).

From Wikipedia [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR], it says that pepperpad has the same gpu as OMAP.
We could extract the way PowerVR uses to communicate from pepperpad kernel driver for it:
From
http://updates.pepper.com/pub/pepper.../pvrdrv.ko.tar
modinfo pvrdrv.ko

Code:
filename:       pvrdrv.ko
license:        GPL
author:         Imagination Technologies plc
depends:
vermagic:       2.6.13.4 preempt ARMv5 gcc-3.4
parm:           VLIOChipSelect:int
parm:           SRAMChipSelect:int
parm:           Prefetch:int
parm:           Timeout:int
parm:           SPAccessViaVLIO:int
parm:           BondConfig:int
parm:           SDRAMMemType:int
parm:           CoreClock:int
parm:           ClockGating:int
Well, you tell me if it is a lost war, or it's worth to me played.
regards

Nickar
 
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Benson is offline Benson
2008-09-23 , 06:59
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#2
Nice steroids; that'll get you kicked out of baseball, you know.

I haven't looked at whether the PepperPad is the same, but I'm not sure it would be, as there are many types of PowerVR; it might be a different version of the MBX. At any rate, lardman on here probably knows as much about that as anyone; I'm sure he'd be able to give more useful comments. You might start by searching for posts by him; you'll find a couple threads on the topic of the powerVR to read up on what's known...

As that module claims to be licensed under GPL, I assume the source is available? If so, it might be valuable. OTOH, if it's open-source, and a driver for the right PowerVR core, I'm a little surprised it hasn't been mentioned. (I've monitored a number of those threads, though I don't know enough to really contribute info.)
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anders_gud is offline anders_gud
2008-09-23 , 07:36
Posts: 118 | Thanked: 297 times | Joined on Nov 2007
#3
Originally Posted by nickar View Post
Well, you tell me if it is a lost war, or it's worth to me played.
regards
As Benson stated : lardman has done some interesting stuff modprobing one of the available .ko's (might be this one), from what I know the OpenGL-ES goodies resides in a proprietary lib shipped from Imagination Technologies
There is more info here on what's going on in the wiki

I thought we were about to get some updates on this in time for the Maemo Summit...
 

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lardman is offline lardman
2008-09-23 , 12:54
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#4
pH5 is another one to talk to about this, he wrote a kernel patch to switch the chipset on. If you fancy collating the available info on the maemo.org wiki I'd be happy to go through my notes and add stuff.

It's probably doable, but will be a pretty steep learning curve. I'd wait until the new Clutter device ships and see what happens regarding support for the older devices...
 
nickar is offline nickar
2008-09-23 , 14:47
Posts: 16 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Sep 2008
#5
As that module claims to be licensed under GPL, I assume the source is available? If so, it might be valuable. OTOH, if it's open-source, and a driver for the right PowerVR core, I'm a little surprised it hasn't been mentioned. (I've monitored a number of those threads, though I don't know enough to really contribute info.)
Despite it being licensed under GPL, noone published the code (the license doen't force you to publicly distribute the code, but to the people you give the binary copy.
If you know of someone having a pepperpad, ask him!.
Originally Posted by lardman View Post
I'd wait until the new Clutter device ships and see what happens regarding support for the older devices...
Do you thing that Nokia will give us the module when they release Clutter? Maybe, but prevention is better than sorry.
There is very little info about this in the wiki, but i think that it's the best way to collaborate.
Originally Posted by Benson
lardman has done some interesting stuff modprobing one of the available .ko's (might be this one), from what I know the OpenGL-ES goodies resides in a proprietary lib shipped from Imagination Technologies
There is already an open source software implementation of opengl es which could help us. We can use it as a base and bind it to the kernel module.


PD: Here It says that the TI OMAP2420 has high speed irda support, tvout, vga out, and jtag!!!
 
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GeneralAntilles is offline GeneralAntilles
2008-09-23 , 14:48
Posts: 5,478 | Thanked: 5,222 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ St. Petersburg, FL
#6
Originally Posted by nickar View Post
PD: Here It says that the TI OMAP2420 has high speed irda support, tvout, vga out, and jtag!!!
Just having it doesn't mean they're hooked up and active.
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nickar is offline nickar
2008-09-23 , 14:50
Posts: 16 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Sep 2008
#7
Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
Just having it doesn't mean they're hooked up and active.
Doen't it mean that you can wire them from the chip?
 
nickar is offline nickar
2008-09-23 , 14:57
Posts: 16 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Sep 2008
#8
Here there are some info about the OMAP.
 
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GeneralAntilles is offline GeneralAntilles
2008-09-23 , 14:58
Posts: 5,478 | Thanked: 5,222 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ St. Petersburg, FL
#9
Originally Posted by nickar View Post
Doen't it mean that you can wire them from the chip?
Ha.

You're really, really, good at soldering up BGAs, then, right?

Note: Just, fyi, the "just wire them up" idea has been discussed to death on several occasions. It's not gonna happen.
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lardman is offline lardman
2008-09-23 , 19:00
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#10
Do you thing that Nokia will give us the module when they release Clutter?
I'm optimistic
 
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