TI Posts Open-Source DRI3 WSEGL Plug-In For PowerVR SGX Graphics

Texas Instruments is still dealing with Imagination Tech PowerVR SGX GPUs and has now posted an open-source DRI3 WSEGL plug-in for getting this binary blob to work with 3D acceleration under an X.Org Server using Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3.

Tomi Valkeinen of Texas Instruments has posted this DRI3 WSEGL implementation for allowing Imagination's PowerVR SGX driver to work with 3D acceleration under X11 using DRI3. WSEGL is the buffer API used by the PowerVR SGX driver.

The post was announced today but this shim plug-in isn't yet considered production quality. The code to this library can be found on GitHub. The code is under the MIT license.

This obviously depends upon Imagination's SGX user-space binary libraries as well as the out-of-tree SGX kernel driver. Also, for now at least, the LLVMpipe Mesa software driver is needed for compositing to the screen when using the modesetting DDX driver.

Unfortunately this is just another obstacle for those relying upon PowerVR SGX hardware in 2018. With the driver stack not being open-source where it could be properly structured for dealing with the relevant mainline interfaces, it's difficult bringing this long notorious graphics hardware in compliance to new/updated Linux standards. There's also been a WSEGL plug-in needed for Wayland support as well on TI hardware.