Broadcom's VC4/V3D Driver Developer Parts Ways To Join Google

Eric Anholt who has near single-handedly been developing the V3D driver stack (formerly known as "VC5") for use by the Raspberry Pi 4 and other newer Broadcom boards as well as maintaining the mature VC4 driver stack he developed for previous Raspberry Pi boards has left Broadcom. But Broadcom's loss is to Google's open-source gain.

Eric Anholt had been working for Broadcom the past five years on the VC4 driver stack as the Mesa Gallium3D driver paired with the in-kernel DRM/KMS driver and then more recently the V3D driver stack that for months now is mainline in Mesa and the Linux kernel. The V3D driver stack is now in use most notably by the recently launched Raspberry Pi 4.

In addition to the V3D OpenGL driver, he did also start work on a Vulkan implementation too for this newer Broadcom graphics driver albeit still has a lot of work left. The V3D driver also is only at OpenGL ES 3.1 support roughly while the hardware is now at OpenGL ES 3.2.

But news this week is that Eric Anholt, who got his start working at Intel on their open-source graphics driver, has left Broadcom. Eric has decided to join Google as part of their growing Chrome OS graphics team. At Google, he will be working on the Freedreno driver stack for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support as well as other Mesa development work.

Eric has confirmed departing Broadcom for Google. In his place, it looks like Broadcom is outsourcing the VC4/V3D driver work to embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin.