Freedreno Gallium3D Driver Begins To Work

The open-source Freedreno driver that is a reverse-engineered software stack for Qualcomm's Adreno/Snapdragon graphics processor continues to quickly hit new milestones. The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that's been worked on for the past month is beginning to function.

Rob Clark has shared that Freedreno Gallium3D driver is beginning to work and has hit the first milestone of being able to run es2gears, an OpenGL ES 2.0 version of the well known glxgears basic GL demo.

While the basic gears demo is working, not much more is working beyond that at this point. Rob wrote on his blog, "There are still a lot of little missing pieces (textures, not translating a lot of tgsi shader opcodes, and it won't work for anything that isn't glClear()ing the color/depth/stencil buffers each frame. Although these shouldn't be too hard to add, just takes time."

The Freedreno project is turning out quite well for a personal project that was announced back in April without the support of Qualcomm. Rob Clark continues to be employed by Texas Instruments working on the OMAP Linux graphics driver but works on Freedreno in his spare time.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver currently isn't in mainline Mesa but can be found on GitHub. New code commits to Freedreno have been happening quite frequently. Below is the video demo of Freedreno handling the gears OpenGL demo on this new driver.

The Lima GPU driver has also been making progress recently on the open-source ARM graphics front for reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics support on Linux.