The sgx5 series are more than a decade old now, and are pretty popular in mobile linux like droid4, n900, beagleboard etc. Having no gpu drivers makes them less useful as the cpus are not that powerful for today’s work. Is there a chance that there would be open source drivers for them, or for atleast the older gpus like sgx540?
Thanks for your feedback Mighty,
Your arguments are very sensible but unfortunately Imagination has no official plans to open-source the sgx drivers. We’ve seen similar feedback in the past and will pass yours on to the appropriate internal teams.
Kind Regards,
David
Hi David,
Thanks for your response to the topic even thought it has been asked many times!
Imagination has released documentation for the Series 6 and above, is it possible that we get documentations for the Series 5 chips as well?
Regards,
Mighty
Hi Mighty,
I regret to inform you that Imagination has no official plans to release that documentation publicly. We appreciate your feedback however as requests like these may influence future discussions on such matters.
Kind Regards,
David
Hi David,
So nothing can be done for these GPUs? 
Hi Mighty,
For this time being that seems to be the case. I hope someday we’ll have better news to share about open sourcing sgx drivers, but hearing requests from the community (such as yours) may help bring that day closer.
Kind Regards,
David
Hello David,
Thats very sad. SGX5 also seems to be missing quite a lot of GLES extensions, making many apps not usable at all. I hope someday we get a solution or something for these gpus, dont want them to become e-waste.
Regards.
Mighty
Now that series 6 got an open source driver… any hopes for series 5?
Hi Mighty,
Many thanks for your question.
Unfortunately we currently don’t have plans for a series 5 open source driver.
Best regards,
Alejandro
Seeing how the company is “commited to open source” and SGX540 was introduced in 2007 (16 years ago now), what’s really stopping you from opening up the register/programming docs for these GPU’s?
It can’t be IP, it’s not like we all don’t know it has a CPU on it running a microkernel which accepts commands from the driver and it’s not like other company’s don’t know how to do that, surely?
I have an old Panda Board 2.0 ES (SGX540 based GPU) sitting doing nothing and I’ve been thinking about some OS level projects (not Linux) and being able to make a start, at least, on a gpu driver for it is a blocker.
Now with series 6 opened up, and lots of people who have devices with the SGX5 series on want to keep their devices running for longer who have been asking for over a decade, surely now’s the time?
I refer you to a another thread here for more.
Thanks,
Luke.
Hi Lucretia,
Regrettably, there have been no recent developments or alterations in the plan to make these drivers open source.
Best Regards,
Nagnath
I’m not asking for the drivers to be opened up, I’m asking for the docs to be so we can make our own.
There’s always reverse engineering of which there has been some work done already. It would be really cool if you could make yourselves available for any questions regarding this.
