New PowerVR SGX reverse engineering project

Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller hns at goldelico.com
Fri Jun 15 21:34:04 CEST 2012


FSF has set up a new PowerVR SGX reverse engineering project
proposed by Luke K.C. Leighton.

Since we have such a GPU in our GTA04 SoC (DM3730), I think there
may be some interest here on this list to support this effort.

The goal is to write free and open replacement drivers and firmware
and maybe do fancy stuff with the GPU shader cores (signal and
image processing).

The mailing list is here:

	https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/powervr-devel

and the project home page is here:

	https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/powervr/

A wiki is being set up by someone soon...

There isn't much more information since the project was just set up.
IMHO a good starting point with a general architectural description
of the PowerVR SGX system can be found in the DM3730 TRM [1].

Someone has found out a little [2] about the USSE instruction set,
which appears to include e.g. Multiply+Add, Fraction, Square Root,
Log, Min/Max, And, Or, Xor. I think this makes it quite useful for signal
processing. But that appears to be all what is known currently.

I encourage to contribute to this project since it will make the GTA04
and OpenPhoenux even more useful for the FLOSS communities.

Nikolaus

[1] http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/sprugn4p/sprugn4p.pdf 	Chapter 8
[2] http://lkcl.net/powervr/sgx/



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