Broadcom's V3D Gallium3D Driver Nears Working Compute Shader Support

Broadcom's next-gen "V3D" driver (formerly known as VC5) being used by some newer Broadcom hardware but more coming down the pipeline in the future has nearly working compute shader support.

We hope the next-gen Raspberry Pi will end up using a Broadcom SoC supporting V3D as besides much better OpenGL capabilities and performance, one of the advantages of V3D -- once the driver stack is in shape -- is compute support -- including ultimately OpenCL and Vulkan, but again more work needs to be done on the software side before that will be realized.

Lead VC4/V3D driver developer Eric Anholt on Friday pushed some more compute shader bits to Mesa 19.1 Git for the V3D Gallium3D driver. That includes the ability to now handle compiling compute shaders.

But not all is well yet as for working support it's still dependent upon the CSD user-space ABI in conjunction with the V3D DRM kernel driver. CSD in this context is the compute shader dispatch interface. So while the compute shader support is dependent upon that, at least the Mesa side compute shader compilation support is in place with Mesa 19.1.