Linux Users Might See A PowerVR Holiday Surprise

[speculatrix]

I am really hoping for a GMA500 drive with reasonable 2D acceleration so as to revive my old Fujitsu UMPC.

people will of course say that I should never have bought a GMA500 based netbook-like UMPC in the first place but it was a compromise I was willing to take, and I resent having to fall back to Windows on it for good media playback.

[droidhacker]

There's still Via and SiS but maybe they'll fade into irrelevance like 3dfx.

Huh? nvidia == (for the most part) 3dfx. It didn't fade, it got consumed.

[cwabbott]

How about, you know, GMA500 and its many descendants? :P But even if they did release a reference driver for that, it's doubtful if it would be of much use, given that Alan Cox's work on it entirely from bits and pieces of documentation is already fairly decent. Unless their reference driver also comes with extra documentation...

Actually, it would be useful. Alan's driver is for the display and (possibly, idk if it's supported yet) 2D bits, which are entirely separate from the 3D (PowerVR) bits.

[slamtonio]

Any new news on this driver being released? I've been working with the GMA500 FBDEV driver developed by Alan Cox on CentOS 6.3 (3.4.13 kernel) and it works well, but I can't control brightness and was hoping this new driver would help.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Any new news on this driver being released?

Unfortunately this "surprise" is not a driver and this code is unrelated to PowerVR: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTI0MzU

[slamtonio]

Darn. Thanks for dashing my hopes. I going go back to working with a newer kernel b/c I hear there is better support for GMA500, unfortunately it breaks something else on my system. Maybe that will be easier to fix. Much appreciated for the response.