> The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use the Vision DSP hardware as a graphics processor, allowing a full graphical desktop environment under Fedora. Following hardware runs will include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU as well.
Also, ImgTec are planning on writing and upstreaming open drivers for Linux and mesa for another RISC-V based board, so probably those drivers will work here too.
I don't think that necessarily says that ImgTec will be upstreaming the open drivers, more that they don't have a better option at the moment and will be replacing closed source components with each revision.
I hope they will, but I'll believe it when I see it. They've been extremely allergic to open source in the past.
The post specifically says upstreaming open drivers, here is a quote:
Imagination is also creating a new open-source GPU driver to provide a complete, up-streamed open-source kernel and user-mode driver stack to support Vulkan® and OpenGL® ES within the Mesa framework. It will be openly developed with intermediate milestones visible to the open-source community and a complete open-source Linux driver will be delivered by Q2 2022. Imagination will work with RIOS to run the open-source GPU driver on the PicoRio open-source platform.
I agree it seems like quite a change of heart and I definitely won't be holding my breath.
That'll be interesting to see how much is actually new. I'm pretty sure they licensed the core of their shader compiler stack, so there was no way it was going to just be opened up, but their GPU ukernel looks totally homegrown and would be a shame to throw away.
They've been delivering that vacuous promise every few years. Being bought by Canyon Bridge, a private equity fund owned by the Chinese government, a few years ago has unfortunately not changed anything.
Having reverse engineered a bit of the drivers, I think it's because they culturally think that all of their value add is in the software. Patents have expired on the TBDR fixed function hardware blocks. The rest is just a combo of a little RISC core that does job dispatch (Programmable Data Sequencer in their parlance), and a cluster of SMT barrel scheduled cores (used to be called USSE in the SGX days, not sure now) that do the heavy lifting wrt shaders that don't really have any secret sauce AFAICT.
The value add is all in the software stack where they run a full little ukernel on the main GPU cores, and optimizing the shit out of the software that runs on those cores from their pretty clever compiler.
I bet they think that if they open source the drivers, that's giving away the one thing that makes PowerVR GPUs special in the first place.
If a IMG person reads this: y'all are wrong with that last piece. Your company is dying without opening the drivers, and you'll be able to control the hardware/software co-design in a way that nobody else can even if you give away the software. You'll have to keep doing work to have new hardware available and stay ahead of the curve, but that's true anyways and is the sign of a healthy business. Sure beats withering away as your patents expire.
