Qualcomm Adreno 600 Series Support Proposed For Linux 4.19 Kernel
The MSM Direct Rendering Manager has long been prepping for Adreno 600 series support as the latest-generation Qualcomm graphics found on their Snapdragon SoCs. The initial code for A6xx was posted earlier this year including work by Qualcomm / Code Aurora on that hardware bring-up. With Linux 4.19 queued in DRM-Next is already the "DPU1" display code needed for newer SoCs and Rob Clark is hoping to get the working A6xx support in place for this cycle.
On Friday Rob sent out msm-next++ for 4.19 with the hopes of having working A6xx support in Linux 4.19. Yes, it's a late pull request given the merge window for 4.19 is opening on Sunday, but the code has been out since earlier in the year and it's also been living in linux-next testing branch for several days without any major fallout.
This A6xx device support is good enough for getting the Adreno graphics working for OpenGL test cases like GLMark2 and Xonotic as well as GLAMOR X.Org acceleration, GNOME Shell, Chromium / Chromium OS, etc. Landing this A6xx final bring-up is just over nine thousand lines of code.
The 3D acceleration obviously relies upon the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. For that, the code is currently living outside of Mesa but the developers are working on getting that under review and then merged for Mesa 18.3. Besides Red Hat's Rob Clark working on it, Kristian Kristensen (Høgsberg) at Google has also been involved in this A6xx 3D support.
The Adreno 600 series is found in the Snapdragon SoCs like the 460, 640, 710, 670, 730, and 845 hardware as the latest-generation support. Adreno is Vulkan-capable but we haven't seen any Freedreno Vulkan driver yet nor any Freedreno OpenCL support although the hardware can achieve CL 2.0.
What makes this Adreno 600 series support even more exciting is that we're on the verge of finally seeing nice ARM-powered laptops with Qualcomm SoCs and that will hopefully play well under Linux... In fact, it's looking like Linux 4.19~5.0 will be working nicely with the latest Snapdragon hardware on the mainline kernel. Interesting times ahead and having the Freedreno driver stack makes the situation a hell of a lot more pleasant than dealing with more ARM graphics driver blobs.
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