Freedreno Gets Patches For A2xx NIR Backend

Should you still be utilizing Qualcomm Adreno 200 series graphics hardware, the open-source graphics driver support is getting better for this hardware that was Adreno's first offering a programmable pipeline and clock speeds up to 133MHz.

Recently A2xx support was added to the MSM DRM driver for using this mainline kernel driver with these Adreno 45nm OpenGL ES 2.0 GPUs. That complements the A2xx GL/GLES support within the Freedreno driver.

But while Freedreno Gallium3D has long been focused on its NIR support, it never received support for this intermediate representation on the 200 series. As a result, Freedreno with A2xx hardware has still been using Gallium's TGSI intermediate representation rather than the NIR code paths.

Now with a set of 16 patches posted on Wednesday, there is the code replacing the TGSI compiler with NIR compiler for A2xx along with other NIR plumbing in the Freedreno code. Besides switching over to this new IR, several GL features/improvements are introduced with this new back-end.

As of writing the code hasn't yet been merged to Mesa 19.0. The Adreno 200 was used by the likes of the Snapdragon S1 and S2 SoCs as well as the Freescale i.MX51/i.MX53.