What is support status of PowerVR GPUs in Fedora? (Intel D2500 and gma500_gfx)

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 13:05 +0100, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:

> I'm really interested what is the state of gma500_gfx driver in latest
> kernel, is it reasonable to expect that this driver will get updated
> and have better support or should I just say to my friend to grab
> version of Windows 7 and to run with it... any suggestions?

Intel's PowerVR-based graphics have _terrible_ support in Linux.
They've been promising for years to either a) provide a competent free
driver and/or b) stop producing pvr-based chipsets, and they have
repeatedly failed at both.

There is no OSS 3D driver for these chips, which is unfortunate, since
3D is the only thing these chips do even remotely well, and they're
inevitably attached to underpowered CPUs where llvmpipe isn't going to
help much.  There's a KMS driver that vaguely works kinda sometimes, as
you've found, but that just lights up the display, it doesn't provide
any acceleration.

I do not expect support for these chips to get materially better any
time soon.  Honestly at this point I don't even want to reverse engineer
the things, it would essentially be rewarding Intel for bad behaviour.

- ajax