Etnaviv Working On Initial Bring-Up Of GC7000L/i.MX8M Graphics

Prominent Etnaviv driver developer Lucas Stach for working on open-source, reverse-engineered Vivante graphics support has posted initial patches for the GC7000L support as found on the i.MX8M SoC.

This bring-up is important especially with Purism hoping to use the i.MX8M for their Librem 5 smartphone and as part of that using the open-source Etnaviv graphics driver.

The ten patches posted today work out around six hundred lines of Etnaviv DRM kernel driver code for lighting up the GC7000L graphics on the NXP i.MX8M.

This Etnaviv Direct Rendering Manager code for the GC7000L isn't enough for the Etnaviv Gallium3D support to move ahead in supporting OpenGL on this new SoC, but it's a start. Lucas Stach says he will be posting more patches soon, so things should get interesting once the groundwork is laid and can begin running OpenGL on the GC7000L/i.MX8M.

The patches for now can be found on dri-devel. These initial bits are too late for DRM-Next to target Linux 4.16 but chances are we'll likely see that preliminary support with Linux 4.17.

The GC7000L has 16 shader cores and is designed to support OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2. The i.MX8M pairs the GC7000 series GPU with Cortex-A53 CPU cores (up to four cores, depending upon the model) at 1.5GHz. The i.MX8M also has a Cortex-M4F for real-time processing, DDR4/DDR3L support, and two USB 3.0 interfaces. At the moment this is likely the SoC to be used by the Librem 5 smartphone, but whether it's a dual/quad core model isn't yet known.