Etnaviv Is Packing Code For An Exciting Linux 5.4 Cycle

While Freedreno and Panfrost have been steaming ahead when it comes to open-source, reverse-engineered graphics for Arm SoCs, the Etnaviv project for targeting Vivante graphics hasn't had too much to report on recently. Fortunately, that's changing as coming up for the Linux 5.4 cycle they have a lot of new code to introduce.

The biggest Etnaviv DRM driver feature for Linux 5.4 is supporting per-process address spaces on capable GPUs, which is necessary for bringing up their Softpin support and in turn supporting the texture descriptor buffers on GC7000 series hardware.

Etnaviv has also been seeing code clean-ups, fixed performance counters for select GPUs, and other bits while the Softpin/per-process address space support is leading the way.

The complete list of Etnaviv changes for Linux 5.4 can be found via this pull request.

Over in user-space side, Etnaviv with their Mesa Gallium3D driver is at roughly OpenGL ES 2.0 plus various other extensions. Etnaviv is the driver planned for use by Purism's Librem 5 smartphone.