Re: the SoC GPU driver interview
On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 09:26:28AM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
> > This is a great interview with folks doing reverse engineering of ARM
> > GPU drivers and devices.
> >
> > http://blog.emmanueldeloget.com/index.php?post/2013/03/08/The-SoC-GPU-driver-interview
> >
> > Only the PowerVR reverse engineering folks are missing from it:
> that's because there's no funding for their efforts, nor is there
> anyone who is financially sufficiently independent to be able to pay
> attention for the required minimum of one man-year of full-time effort
> required to complete the work.
I think it's rather the PowerVR architecture is too complex to RE.
There is a huge firmware the driver loads to the powervr gpu you would
have to reverse engineer first - reverse engineering the command stream
from the driver doesn't get you anywhere, as you would get firmware
rather than gpu commands...
Anyone who's actually worked with powervr tend to say it's a horrible mess
tell you to run away from the hardware if you can.
Then again, that is quite similar to the Videocore setup that someone actually
decided to start reverse engineering...
Anyways, rather than push for more reverse engineering projects to get
started, I think we should concentrate in finishing the current projects.
Riku
Reply to: