[Arm-netbook] Reverse Engineering Tegra2 GPU

[Gordan Bobic]

lkcl luke wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
>> Luke,
>>
>> IIRC you mentioned you had some contact with the guy(s) who reverse
>> engineered the Nvidia GPU so that an OSS driver could be written and
>> that the word was that Tegra2 was a not very different from their
>> desktop GPUs.
> 
>  yes.  although he said also that it's easier because everything's in
> userspace and also there's no FIFO, everything's memory-mapped.  so
> you just poke around in userspace and you're done.
> 
>> Could you please point me in the direction of the people in question?
> 
>  huh.  i didn't already??

You mentioned it in passing, but I think it was OT for the thread where 
it was mentioned and it got lost.

>> I'd be happy to donate an AC100 to the cause of reverse engineering the
>> GPU in the interest of enabling the creation of an OSS driver.
> 
>  i think you'll find he's already got one.
> 
>  http://marcheu.blogspot.com/2010/05/looking-at-tegra2.html

Great, thanks.

>  i'm actually quite tempted to say i'll take you up on that instead,
> as if i wasn't doing enough already :)  of all the GPUs i think if
> this one has such a simple design and also if the tegra 3 has such a
> damn good spec it would be worthwhile tackling that one just to get
> _some_ decent FSF-endorseable modern CPU out there.

Sure, but be careful what you take on. I'll happily do daily testing 
from, your git tree. :) Right now _anything_ that improves even one iota 
on the dumb frame buffer would be most excellent. :)

If you are confident such a project is likely to get anywhere, email me 
off list with where to post it.

Gordan