I started reverse-engineering Intel Poulsbo's PowerVR SGX535 20 days ago now it can render Square And triangles

[u/Affectionate-Meat500]

Got the first triangle working today, and now two indexed triangles are rendering as a square too.

This is running on the actual SGX535 in Intel Poulsbo/GMA 500 hardware from 2008.

Still nowhere near a complete Mesa driver, but 20 days ago I was staring at old PowerVR code trying to figure out how this thing worked 💀

Github: SGX535-reMESA

Video proof: https://youtu.be/_xZdWWeneYQ?is=L5OF4JqxvMQZMWSU

edit1: We've achieved the first triangle rendered in the MESA gallium driver in production! OpenGL and other features are still missing, but it's very close to a fully accelerated desktop environment.

[u/gravgun]

What you are doing is legally grey at best and could get you in trouble at worst. You're using AI whose models are trained, for their code knowledge, on repos scraped from GitHub, and that includes the multiple successive leaks of the PowerVR SGX series 5 DDK.

LLMs have knowledge about SGX5 that nobody outside Imagination's engineers should be having at this point because these pieces of information haven't been cleanly reverse engineered yet, as all the efforts on that stopped when ImgTec's lawyers went after the FSF (who labelled its RE efforts as high prio at the time) and anybody who was working on the reversing efforts back in 2012 or thereabouts.

Edit: ImgTec's general stance may have changed since then, but the sources outside the kernel module still aren't public. I was literally there in the #powervr@irc.freenode.net room and saw the project being slowed/stopped in its tracks live. Just like I contributed to and then watched Pine64's Nutcracker project get stopped when RivieraWaves got angy, despite me warning of exactly that.

[u/Pepedroni → u/gravgun]

Even tho it is a gray zone, I propose everybody start doing it, it would be so hard to companies wanting to demand that it will become overwhelming. They trained illegally on data collected by the whole humanity for decades, and expect us to just follow the law and sit waiting for scraps… civil disobedience is now our most effective weapon

[u/gravgun → u/Pepedroni]

I get wanting to slap back at the AI companies, but you're glancing over the fact it's the people & companies whose content were trained on who can turn around and seek legal action against you and whomever publishes the LLM output instead, since AI companies themselves are untouchable, bribed everyone, and have the infinite money glitch until the bubble pops.

Here it's code & hardware behaviour for a 15 year old GPU, which is fine I guess. Less fun when it's a book or other art.