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Midgard is usable - GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma usable.. even SuperTuxKart with GLES3 usable now: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/02/27/experim

Midgard is usable - GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma usable.. even SuperTuxKart with GLES3 usable now: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/02/27/experimental-panfrost-gles-3-support-has-landed/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/02/27/expe... Bifrost is quite early as you can see from the article this thread is for. > Surely there are loads of GPUs without open source drivers Mali is very popular (so many SoCs from Rockchip, Amlogic, Allwinner, etc.) and actually was sort of the last holdout among them. Etnaviv, VC4, Freedreno all predate Panfrost and (the resurrected and upstreamed version of) Lima. Now I guess the last holdout would be PowerVR but it's not like there's so many devices with their GPUs. Nokia N900 and early iPhones I think?

zozbot234 6y ago
Lots of early androids have powervr gpus with no free support, which is a serious showstopper for pmOS and the like. It even shows up in some low-end x86-based devices, which are not even supported by current Windows 10 as a result.
MegaDeKay 6y ago
Beaglebone uses PowerVR, unfortunately. This is a very powerful little platform (PRUs For The Win!) held back by closed source graphics drivers.
monocasa 6y ago
I spent a while playing with PowerVR trying to reverse it on my beaglebone. It's a huge pain, they feel like an order of magnitude more effort than Mali cores to get running with free drivers as they run a full RTOS on their GPU cores. They also have tons of bugs they hack around on a per rev basis around the caching and virtual memory systems which means your reversed code will sort of work for a bit, then start mysteriously start failing as you pull your hair out for a month. Neat design; I just wish Imagination would get their head out of their ass and approach the community. They might still have a viable business if they had done that before now.
- floatboth 6y ago
  RTOS on.. SIMD units?? o_0
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Most unified shader GPUs have the same semantics, they just run the priority thread scheduler in hardware. PowerVR was being cute and saving gates and their power cost by making the shader cores themselves handle all that rather than a dedicated hardware block.

zozbot234 6y ago

Lots of early androids have powervr gpus with no free support, which is a serious showstopper for pmOS and the like. It even shows up in some low-end x86-based devices, which are not even supported by current Windows 10 as a result.

MegaDeKay 6y ago

Beaglebone uses PowerVR, unfortunately. This is a very powerful little platform (PRUs For The Win!) held back by closed source graphics drivers.

monocasa 6y ago

I spent a while playing with PowerVR trying to reverse it on my beaglebone. It's a huge pain, they feel like an order of magnitude more effort than Mali cores to get running with free drivers as they run a full RTOS on their GPU cores. They also have tons of bugs they hack around on a per rev basis around the caching and virtual memory systems which means your reversed code will sort of work for a bit, then start mysteriously start failing as you pull your hair out for a month. Neat design; I just wish Imagination would get their head out of their ass and approach the community. They might still have a viable business if they had done that before now.

floatboth 6y ago
RTOS on.. SIMD units?? o_0
- monocasa 6y ago
  Most unified shader GPUs have the same semantics, they just run the priority thread scheduler in hardware. PowerVR was being cute and saving gates and their power cost by making the shader cores themselves handle all that rather than a dedicated hardware block.