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

[Andrew Price]

On 14/11/13 15:59, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 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.

On the one hand, you're absolutely right. On the other hand, I own a 
Samsung NC110 netbook which has one of these PowerVR suckers in it so I 
deeply appreciate the excruciatingly laborious work that these folks are 
doing:

http://powervr.gnu.org.ve/doku.php (site seems broken at the moment :( )
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:PowerVR_drivers (decent summary)

Andy