Etnaviv Gallium3D Driver Revived, Render-Only Library Updated Too
Etnaviv has been a long-time coming and it's been nearly four years that I've been writing about it on Phoronix as the reverse-engineered, full-stack open-source driver solution for systems making use of Vivante graphics. The DRM driver has been mainline for a few cycles now while back in November the Gallium3D driver was proposed for Mesa.
Coming out yesterday was the "v2" patches of the Etnaviv Gallium3D code, which now include build system integration and the reworked render-only library. As explained previously:
This new render-only library is designed as "a lightweight library to add basic infrastructure for renderonly GPUs. With this library it is possible to run wayland or and other kms egl apps...The renderonly library approach is a temporary workaround until 'gbm2' is ready. I am aware that not everybody is happy about it but it helps to increase the possible use cases like wayland and kms egl apps. Also keep in mind that this library was only made for the embedded use case and will not work with hybrid GPUs etc...It does all the magic regarding in/exporting buffers etc." So this is temporary until "GBM2" is ready, in other words, the effort led by NVIDIA on a new memory allocation API and looks like the work on improving/replacing GBM is of benefit to the Etnaviv developers too.
The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver plus render-only Gallium library amount to 15k lines of code. Those wishing to check out the latest patches while waiting for it to be mainlined in Mesa (hopefully before the next release in February!) can see the Mesa-dev list.
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