On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 11:03 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
Yes, it more or less does; that's why they sub-contracted the development, the hardware is substantially different from previous Intel chips, and the existing Linux development team within Intel didn't have much familiarity with it, and was too busy to drop everything and learn about this new hardware. So they contracted development out to a group who are very familiar with the PowerVR hardware, but apparently think a driver which relies on a libdrm branch and three separate chunks of proprietary code (not to mention a badly-written kernel module just to make 2D work) is a sensible design.
More accurately, that's what Tungsten _had_ to implement, because Imagination (the PowerVR people) were unwilling or unable to allow open code.
I've been told, though, that the GMA500 is actually a Frankenstein design, with the PowerVR 3D (and hardware video playback acceleration) core glued on to a standard Intel 2D core, so if that's accurate, it should be reasonably easy to come with at least a basic native accelerated 2D driver which doesn't depend on all the horrible proprietary crack, which would be fine for a lot of people. The 3D and video playback acceleration features are nice, but not essential. It'd be nice if Intel would just kick out a driver like that, at least.
IIRC it's an Intel-ish output block, but PVR acceleration blocks (both 2D and 3D). Not quite the same thing.
- ajax