V3DV Developers Lay Out Plans For Upstreaming The Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Driver In Mesa

Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa.

In a mailing list post today they note they are down to just 18 test cases failing for the Vulkan CTS while 106,776 tests are passing for this Vulkan Conformance Test Suite. Vulkan games like the respun versions of Quake 1-3 and OpenArena are working along with various game emulators. Various Vulkan demos also run well too.

The V3DV effort at the moment is around 525 patches, which would be quite a burden to review. But only around five patches touch common Mesa code like NIR, Vulkan WSI, and the build system. The Igalia developers are hoping to get reviews on that before upstreaming. There is also another two dozen or so patches touching the common Broadcom driver infrastructure shared with the OpenGL driver. But the rest are all patches just assembling this Vulkan driver.

The hope by the developers is the review process can go fairly quickly by having Mesa developers review the few common Mesa patches, someone on their team or at Broadcom / Raspberry Pi to review the other Broadcom infrastructure patches, and largely to rely on their faith in approving all the rest of the patches for merging.

This Vulkan driver primarily for the Raspberry Pi 4 amounts to just under thirty-thousand lines of code in its current form.

Those wanting to follow the upstreaming process can see this mailing list thread. There is also the work-in-progress merge request now opened.

If this all gets reviewed and tidied up quickly it's possible to see this new driver in Mesa 20.3 to release by year's end otherwise will likely come in Mesa 21.0 next year.