Freedreno Gallium3D Lands MSAA Support For Qualcomm Adreno 600 Series

While Qualcomm was busy hosting their Tech Summit this week in Hawaii, the independent open-source developers were pressing ahead with their reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno 3D graphics driver support.

Rob Clark of Red Hat and Kristian Kristensen of Google landed their latest Freedreno Gallium3D driver improvements into Mesa 19.0. The most notable addition was multi-sample anti-aliasing support (MSAA) for the Adreno 600 series hardware. There is also now EXT_multisampled_render_to_texture support exposed by this Gallium3D driver. Besides that work there were also fixes and other changes.

Over the past few months the open-source A6xx support has been coming together for this latest generation graphics supported by Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs. Over on the kernel side, the MSM DRM driver picked up A6xx support in Linux 4.19 while Mesa picked up the support in the new 18.3 release albeit continuing to be improved upon for the in-development Mesa 19.0.

This effort is helped along by Google using the MSM DRM driver with their Pixel 3 smartphone and with their push for Direct Rendering Manager drivers by all Android devices, we continue seeing Google contributing more at least to the kernel-side bits but also some contributions to Mesa like hear with Kristian's work.