Panajev2001a said:
Seriously, the hypervisor does not ban all access to anything beyond running a calculator. You could have said the same things few weeks ago "why would Sony be interested in granting access to the SPE's, if they took the measures and created the hypervisor to prevent access?" following the same kind of reasoning you are presenting here, yet close to the metal access to the CELL Broadband Engine has been granted.
The thing is, the hypervisor doesn't restrict access to the SPEs, but it does restrict access to the GPU. That was obviously a design choice. Why should Sony
change that
after they decided to go that route in the first place?
Also, giving an OpenGL driver does NOT mean opening up all specifications of RSX or releasing trade secrets or letting you code for RSX down to the metal.
Depends. There are three ways to get an accellerated, full-featured OpenGL driver:
- Nvidia relases a driver. Highly unlikely.
- Nvidia releases the specifications and Sony removes the hypervisor restriction. Not in a thousand years.
- Sony removes the hypervisor restrictions and the community tries to create it's own drivers from scratch, without specs. Even with direct hardware access, nobody managed to create a working, full-featured driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux in years - even though there were many projects trying and many people interested. There's still a project working on it, and they're making progress, but their driver is far from complete, let alone usable.
The best bet would be to simply ignore RSX and optimize the hell out of MESA on CELL. Not as fast as real GPU access, but probably good enough.
Providing basic 2D and 3D acceleration would also be in their best interest not to utterly embarrass their Open Platform offering by staying stuck to a frame-buffer device dragging also CELL performance down.
Basic 2D accelleration, XV and EXA, should be sufficient to keep the embarrassment to a minimum...
First, because the potential user-base would still be quite large.
Still, Nvidia would need Sonys permission, and an updated hypervisor. Even then I doubt it'll happen. PS3 Linux isn't suited for applications that would need OpenGL, anyway. It's mostly about "toys", emulators and such, and maybe an OpenGL-accellerated desktop. But there's still software rendering, so that would only be an option. It's not like you could or would like to run Softimage|XSI or Pro/E Wildfire on PS3 Linux, anyway.
Second, nVIDIA does not have to do all the work. I think they can allow access to the RSX and maybe the Game OS RSX driver (the Game OS IS running on the side or else how do you explain those 60+ MB of RAM unavailable to Fedora Core 5
).
A driver running on GameOS with some sort of pseudo-driver for Linux that interfaces with the real driver? Sounds complicated, but might be possible.
