> So in mid-2012 he decided to do something about it. He was working for TI at the time, so PowerVR-based GPUs (as used by TI) were off-limits. He found some hardware that had an Adreno 220 and started to reverse engineer it. He began work on a Gallium driver in November 2012. By early 2013, he had most of the "normal stuff" working. He could run GNOME Shell and some games on the hardware.
So it's been done before, but of course Freedreno's Rob Clark is undoubtedly exceptionally good as well.
You have to wonder if the M1 situation would be different if he had been working for another company... (M1 GPU is PowerVR descendant and there hasn't been a open source driver for that lineage historically)
For me it's a bit surprising that there are not more people working on it, the M1 having been out for 2 years already and this having wider appeal than the Freedreno initial users audience.
But, maybe the 1 person way is better, since the Nouveau history seems to be people coming and going and work progressing in fits and starts: https://lwn.net/Articles/269558/
(Also the nouveau people were first to start, so they cleared way and paid a lot of dues saved by subsequent projects)
