Raspberry Pi / VC4 Software Support Continues Improving

The Raspberry Pi software stack and particularly its open-source VC4 graphics driver stack continues getting better along with the mainline support for this popular ARM SBC.

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has shared his latest regular update concerning progress on VC4. Recent work includes getting more kernel/Mesa code back-ported for Raspbian, the 7-inch touchscreen panel driver for the Raspberry Pi driver continues being reworked, the Mesa support is in place for the pl111, and EGL_ANDROID_native_fence support is being explored for VC4 Gallium3D.

Some kernel work to benefit the Raspberry Pi in general with Linux 4.13 includes USB OTG support for the Raspberry Pi Zero, SDHOST is enabled by default, thermal support is enabled by default, and the Raspberry Pi 3 DeviceTree is installed now for 32-bit kernels too.

Eric ended his latest status report by saying, "[The new material for Linux 4.13] took months longer than they should have, because the Linux kernel has the worst software development process I’ve worked with since XFree86."