Freedreno Gallium3D Tackling NIR Optimizations & More In 2018

Freedreno project leader Rob Clark who is employed by Red Hat has provided a status update on his activities around this reverse-engineered, open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver.

Aside from what we have covered on Freedreno's continued OpenGL/Gallium3D advancements, he also notes his Qualcomm IOMMU driver was mainlined in Linux 4.14. He also notes how the overall support for Qualcomm SoCs with the upstream Linux kernel has been improved a great deal since he began working on Freedreno. In fact, Fedora 27 works with the DB410C development board out-of-the-box.

Other recent work to Freedreno includes improvements to its NIR intermediate optimization passes, better instruction scheduling, and various other improvements.

Rob Clark noted about the performance improvements as a result of his continued optimizations, "The end results tend to depend on how complex the shaders that a game/benchmark uses. At the extreme high end, 4x improvement for alu2. On the other hand, probably doesn't make much difference for older games like xonotic. Supertuxkart and most of the other gfxbench benchmarks show something along the lines of 10-20% improvement."

More details on the Freedreno state via this blog post.