Freedreno Gallium3D Now Handles Running XBMC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freedreno Gallium3D Now Handles Running XBMC

While the Freedreno driver was only born last April as an open-source reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno/Snapdragon graphics driver, its Gallium3D driver is already onto handling the XBMC multimedia player...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI3OTA

[przemoli]

Kudso for that work

Michael maybe you should make round of comparisons between all those FLOSS drivers for embedded gpus vs their official proprietary counterparts?

[oliver]

Now if we had link to the original source, we could read some more into it. Or at the very least a link to the freedreno project page. http://freedreno.github.com/

[uid313]

Great work

Many system-on-chip uses the Adreno graphics processing unit.

So many of these small Raspberry Pi clones and USB memory sized computers may have this chip. Then with this driver they can use those small computers with a TV.

[fa5hion]

Which Adreno gpus (200-330) are supported by this driver? An upcoming 600/800 series Snapdragon combined with open source 2D/3D would be a killer package.

[robclark]

Which Adreno gpus (200-330) are supported by this driver? An upcoming 600/800 series Snapdragon combined with open source 2D/3D would be a killer package.

Right now, the only snapdragon hw I have is w/ a220. I do have some iMX5 hw with what is basically an a200 (although different kernel driver). I don't have anything yet with a3xx... a nexus-4 would be nice but a bit short on storage space and always seems to be sold out whenever I look. I'm kinda hoping if I procrastinate long enough, a nice tablet with big display, plenty of storage, and a3xx will come out. Nexus device would be preferred because then I know it won't be locked and I won't have issues rebuilding my own kernel. Having hdmi-out would be a plus, since so far the msm fbdev driver seems to be made of fail and I had to spend too much time already debugging and hacking on it just to get the lcd panel in my touchpad to approximately work, so having a backup display option would be nice. The msm kernel is in dire need of a sane drm/kms display driver!

My guess, based on looking at the kernel code, is that there are not differences that are too major between the various a2xx devices. I'm not really sure yet about a3xx. Basically, I'd like to finish up a few more little things, and then get the a220 gallium support merged in upstream mesa tree, and then I should have some more time to start looking at other adreno revisions. Of course, anyone out there with an a3xx and an itch, patches are welcome :-)

BR,
-R

[droidhacker]

Right now, the only snapdragon hw I have is w/ a220. I do have some iMX5 hw with what is basically an a200 (although different kernel driver). I don't have anything yet with a3xx... a nexus-4 would be nice but a bit short on storage space and always seems to be sold out whenever I look. I'm kinda hoping if I procrastinate long enough, a nice tablet with big display, plenty of storage, and a3xx will come out. Nexus device would be preferred because then I know it won't be locked and I won't have issues rebuilding my own kernel. Having hdmi-out would be a plus, since so far the msm fbdev driver seems to be made of fail and I had to spend too much time already debugging and hacking on it just to get the lcd panel in my touchpad to approximately work, so having a backup display option would be nice. The msm kernel is in dire need of a sane drm/kms display driver!

My guess, based on looking at the kernel code, is that there are not differences that are too major between the various a2xx devices. I'm not really sure yet about a3xx. Basically, I'd like to finish up a few more little things, and then get the a220 gallium support merged in upstream mesa tree, and then I should have some more time to start looking at other adreno revisions. Of course, anyone out there with an a3xx and an itch, patches are welcome :-)

BR,
-R

I have two questions for you;
1) You figure it should work an a 225? As I understand it, 225 is like a 220, but just smaller/faster.
2) How far (if not already) do you figure this is from handling AOSP? I'm having a murder of a time getting the qualcomm adreno drivers working with AOSP 4.2 on my MSM8260A (krait w/adreno225). I would love to just blow the blob drivers out the window, even at a massive performance penalty.

[coder111]

Kudos, Rob

Hi,

I just wanted to say nice work. Getting all that done probably wasn't easy...

BTW, what about video decoding? Is it software only, or is it accelerated? Is there anything in hardware to accelerate video decoding?

--Coder

[robclark]

I have two questions for you;
1) You figure it should work an a 225? As I understand it, 225 is like a 220, but just smaller/faster.
2) How far (if not already) do you figure this is from handling AOSP? I'm having a murder of a time getting the qualcomm adreno drivers working with AOSP 4.2 on my MSM8260A (krait w/adreno225). I would love to just blow the blob drivers out the window, even at a massive performance penalty.

I *think* a225 just has more ALU's (translate => faster shaders), and that is transparent to sw and handled in hw thread scheduler. Well, that isn't 100% true, looking at the kernel code, there are a few different registers and a work-around or two.. but reasonable chance that userspace doesn't need to care.

As far as AOSP, well I've seen some patches related to building mesa for android.. so maybe it is possible. TBH my focus so far has been getting a more "traditional" linux desktop work. But I guess in theory, that should be mostly related to build system and window system / egl, and transparent to the gallium driver. You might want to try some basic linux/x11 type environment first, just to test whether things are working ok on a225. Fwiw, either for android or linux, you'll need to enable the drm support in the kernel for mesa.

BR,
-R