Freedreno Gallium3D Is Close To Merging In Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freedreno Gallium3D Is Close To Merging In Mesa

Rob Clark has sent out a revised Freedreno Gallium3D driver that he's hoping to be merged into the mainline Mesa repository. This provides an open-source user-space driver for the Qualcomm Adreno A220 graphics hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMxMjY

[scionicspectre]

So, forgive my naivety, but does this mean we can run accelerated X11 on these devices, or is the KMS/DRM kernel still necessary for that? It appears that several 3D apps can be run on this architecture already- is this because they are compiled to make use of the non-DRM driver through Gallium3D, or could a full DE be run in the same fashion?

I'm just really curious as to what this means for us in the context of running a full software stack.

[curaga]

This is a 3d driver, 2d acceleration on ARM is using a different block.

[asdfblah]

So, forgive my naivety too, but... from what I've read, adreno GPUs are related in some way to radeon GPUs. Is it possible to use the work done from one driver to the other? I mean, to save some work at least, or the other way around, cooperate in the process of improving both drivers.

[Veerappan]

They are related, but I'm not sure if they share any actual common design elements.

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageon

[AJenbo]

Gallium3D already allows for a lot of sharing compared to doing things from the ground up.

[robclark]

This is a 3d driver, 2d acceleration on ARM is using a different block.

just a side note, the xf86-video-freedreno counterpart currently requires a device w/ a 2d core (z180).. although I have to sort something out for snapdragon's without a 2d core (the older ones, or the newest a3xx like the one in my nexus4 do not have 2d cores). For these I'll probably end up using gallium exa state tracker.