The Raspberry Pi Gallium3D Driver Has Made Much Progress In Less Than A Year

It was just last June that Eric Anholt left Intel for Broadcom to focus on creating the Broadcom VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi to have a new DRM/KMS driver and a Gallium3D driver. In less than one year, he's made a lot of progress.

There's been many Phoronix articles on the VC4 driver since Anholt started the work at Broadcom. While the DRM/KMS driver has yet to be mainlined in the Linux kernel, it's shaped up quite well and most of his current time is spent readying the Gallium3D driver. The VC4 Gallium3D driver has been part of mainline Mesa for months and is turning out to be a decent OpenGL ES 2.0 driver for the Raspberry Pi.

If you haven't been reading the dozens of Phoronix articles detailing Eric's work on the VC4 driver, he presented last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2015 Auckland about this graphics driver stack. For those keeping up to speed of the Phoronix articles, mailing lists, and Git activity, the presentation doesn't add too much value.

On a slightly related Linux graphics note, Ian Romanick of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center presented at LCA2015 about reducing memory usage of Mesa's GLSL compiler: