TURNIP Open-Source Adreno Vulkan Driver Adds A618 Support, Sysmem Rendering

While the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers get talked about a lot, one of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is Turnip but it's been gaining steam recently.

Turnip is the open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware and basically falls into the Freedreno umbrella. With Freedreno Gallium3D for OpenGL being in very good shape, we are finally seeing more activity on Turnip both by Google engineers and community developers.

Adreno 618 support was added this week based on the Freedreno Gallium3D support with just needing the GPU ID and a few magic values. The Adreno 618 is found within the Snapdragon 730 series SoCs.

A bigger item worked on is adding sysmem rendering support to Turnip Vulkan, similar to the sysmem rendering code in the Gallium3D driver. The immediate motivation for this code is to use it for mipmapped non-aligned linear stores to workaround an issue brought up by dEQP testing with the Adreno 640. But moving forward the sysmem rendering support can help enhance performance and is also necessary for bringing up tessellation support, geometry shaders, and other advanced rendering features. Details via this now honored merge request.

It will be interesting to see what more comes to this open-source Adreno Vulkan driver ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.1 release.