Imagination Releases Full ISA Documentation For PowerVR Rogue GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Imagination Releases Full ISA Documentation For PowerVR Rogue GPUs

Imagination Technologies released the PowerVR SDK v3.4 this morning and while it may not sound too interesting for most Phoronix readers, it's a very interesting release in that for the first time they are providing full instruction set documentation for their latest PowerVR GPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgxOTM

[chuckula]

Press Release contains a big lie

""This is the first time an ISA for a GPU supported by the Android ecosystem has been made public."

Yeah.. my Baytrail Android tablet includes an Intel GPU that is fully documented and has had open-source drivers available for a long long time. Nice try though.

[jakubo]

""This is the first time an ISA for a GPU supported by the Android ecosystem has been made public."

Yeah.. my Baytrail Android tablet includes an Intel GPU that is fully documented and has had open-source drivers available for a long long time. Nice try though.

so is it basically a lie or are they too self absorbed or uninformed (neither of those is a good sign) to see what others did a long time ago?
or have no documentation up to date been this thorough and complete?

[uid313]

Awesome

This is awesome!
I've long hated PowerVR!

I wish they did this a decade ago.

[Adarion]

I believe it when I see the first fully working free driver that works on more than one specific chip for a specific vendor. Everything else is a fairy tale they make up to get into news again.

[IsacDaavid]

I very much agree with the three comments above mine. This is slightly good news for prospect reverse engineers planning on a free driver, but nothing to be extremely joyful and grateful with Imagination Tech. at all. I know the FSF listed this as one of their most-wanted projects and some work revealing the series 5 ISA was done, but nothing else. I wonder how different the series 5 ISA is to series 6, and why nobody has even started a reverse-engineered driver. Pretty much every ARM GPU family has a reverse-engineered FOSS driver with varying degrees of functionality and completeness; all but PowerVR. Are PowerVR chips as disgusting and convoluted as the etnaviv dev was saying?

[libv]

I very much agree with the three comments above mine. This is slightly good news for prospect reverse engineers planning on a free driver, but nothing to be extremely joyful and grateful with Imagination Tech. at all. I know the FSF listed this as one of their most-wanted projects and some work revealing the series 5 ISA was done, but nothing else. I wonder how different the series 5 ISA is to series 6, and why nobody has even started a reverse-engineered driver. Pretty much every ARM GPU family has a reverse-engineered FOSS driver with varying degrees of functionality and completeness; all but PowerVR. Are PowerVR chips as disgusting and convoluted as the etnaviv dev was saying?

I think you mean lima driver developer. And you are welcome as yes, it is that convoluted.

But! This is just the isa, and they are doing this to finally get some traction for Rogue on OpenCL and AArch64. The convolutedness will still mean that this will not lead to a proper free driver, and yes, no-one should bother trying to create one: the actual hindrance is still there, just as before.

Imgtec really should contact some good open source folks and task them directly, but that does not seem to be their agenda here.

[bnolsen]

I think you mean lima driver developer. And you are welcome as yes, it is that convoluted.

But! This is just the isa, and they are doing this to finally get some traction for Rogue on OpenCL and AArch64. The convolutedness will still mean that this will not lead to a proper free driver, and yes, no-one should bother trying to create one: the actual hindrance is still there, just as before.

Imgtec really should contact some good open source folks and task them directly, but that does not seem to be their agenda here.

I figured so. imgtech would need to drop some implementation of their current GL driver to make this a go. Just dumping docs about the ISA seems like a fairly minute move forward.

[zanny]

It is the first if you use a half dozen qualifiers to make it so.

It is the first generally available ARM based GPU to have opened up ISA documentation that is found in consumer handheld hardware running Android.

And all those stipulations are simply because AMD makes hybrid Cortex + Radeon chips for servers and embedded systems and they seem to be interested in mobile, but have not made a move on it yet.

And the open Broadcom driver that the Raspi uses is on an ARM system, but that dev board is not a mobile device.

Regardless, releasing your ISA is not saying much. In the spectrum from open ethical respect of your users to Nvidia, this is effectively saying "we are not going to be schoolyard bullies stealing your lunch money and locking you in lockers, instead were fat lazy sobs that are going to sit around eating crisps feeling good about ourselves".

There is a huge difference between publishing reference manuals to your hardware and actually doing something in the open with it. When their OpenGL driver is free software I'll go buy their stuff eagerly to reinforce good behavior. Releasing your ISA just means you aren't a complete asshole. I mean, imagine a CPU without a public ISA spec. I can, and they all died in the 1980s like they deserved.

You want to know the ultimate solution to OpenGL? Open GPU architectures that don't require a massive API overtop of closed source bullshit all the way down from the hardware to the userspace interpreter because you could write a compiler, you know, like LLVM or GCC, that could translate any number of higher level programming languages and paradigms competing with each other in the GPU space to any number of GPU ISAs since that is the way to implement things that make sense.

[souenzzo]

So, some day we will be able to install a (usable) GNU/Linux distro on android phones?