Qualcomm Adreno 700 Series GPU Support Published For Open-Source Linux Driver

Linaro engineers have been working out support for the latest-generation Qualcomm Adreno 700 series graphics processors found in the newest Snapdragon SoCs. Published on Wednesday were the initial MSM DRM kernel driver patches for bringing up the A700 series open-source graphics support.

Linaro's Konrad Dybcio posted the set of 14 kernel patches for enabling Adreno 700 series support with a particular focus at this point on the Adreno 730 found in the SM8450 and the Adreno 740 found within the SM8550 SoC. Among the reasons for making the Adreno 700 series interesting is the Adreno 740 is Qualcomm's first GPU with hardware ray-tracing support. There are also the Adreno 702 and Adreno 725 GPUs already released while presumably they will see support at a later date and should be a simple addition in building off this Adreno 700 series driver foundation.

The Adreno 740 is found within the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.

The Adreno 700 series support with the MSM DRM driver in turn is at rough feature parity on the kernel side to the existing Adreno 600 series support. The hardware ray-tracing support is still to be tackled. The driver also has to deal with new "very sophisticated multi-threading" on the new GPUs.

The MSM DRM driver patches are out for review on the dri-devel list. Though due to the timing aren't expected to be merged until at least the v6.6 kernel cycle. There is also a Mesa merge request that provides partial A700 series support for the TURNIP 3D driver.