Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Mesa Driver Nearing OpenGL ES 3.1

Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support.

Igalia has been working recently on V3D shader compiler improvements with implementing more pieces of NIR as well as addressing test case failures / bugs. One of the areas they have been working on a lot is OpenGL transform feedback.

Of much excitement, they are almost at OpenGL ES 3.1 support for the Raspberry Pi 4. They are hoping to ideally get the V3D OpenGL ES 3.1 support into Mesa 19.3 releasing in a month and a half. However, first they need to clean up some conformance test suite issues around their GLES 3.1 / compute shader code. The Igalia developers teased that following this they are going to be working on geometry shader support for the Raspberry Pi 4 V3D driver. These improvements are just for the Raspberry Pi 4 with the VideoCore graphics in earlier RPi boards being on the older driver and woefully underpowered and not capable of these more demanding features.

More details on their current efforts via the RaspberryPi.org blog.