Re: Debian tablet computer
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 11:39:09AM +0200, Louis-Maurice De Sousa wrote:
>> Video chipset is a PowerVR. I suppose we wouldn't have this problem.
>> For the kdelibs problem, perhaps could we help having a Debian Blend
>> design for tablets, and based on Active Plasma. Like DebianEdu.
>
> PowerVR is almost certainly the worst possible option if you ever want
> an opensource driver.
>
> Almost every other ARM video chip has reverse engineering in progress,
> while the PowerVR seems doomed to never happen (it is just way too weird).
it's based around a processor core that was i believe developed
through a connection to imperial college, and the company was bought
by imgtec over two decades ago. it has been used as the basis for the
3D engine. the original designer however left a looong time ago.
based around that amazingly-flexible core (which is perfectly capable
of running a full operating system), a huge amorphous mess has grown
up which is completely unmaintainable by the few people left in
img-tec who are barely able to keep up with it. "improvements" are
done by tweaking the hard macros and dialing up the number of parallel
engines.
the software is such a mess - precisely because of the flexible
design - that powervr is known to fall over on a regular basis, mostly
related to complex shading.
ignoring the proprietary software complexity: from a
reverse-engineering perspective what this means is that the hardware
is just way too complex to tackle in a reasonable time-frame without
some serious funding.
but, louis, from your perspective, if you're going to be needing that
3D engine for any serious educational purposes then please do take
into consideration the fact that the product *will* be unreliable and
there's absolutely nothing you can do about it [except to not use the
3D engine and to use software 3D instead, in which case, why are you
paying extra for the integrated powervr hardware??].
l.
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