Raspberry Pi's VC4 Driver Picks Up ETC1, Fragment Shader Threading In Linux 4.10

The Linux 4.10 features so far continue to be expanded with the Broadcom VC4 DRM driver most notably used by Raspberry Pi hardware picking up some new functionality.

The VC4 DRM driver for providing open-source Raspberry Pi 3D capabilities with Linux 4.10 has added the kernel-side support for ETC1 texture compression while the VC4 Gallium3D driver has already been updated with this support when on a supported kernel.

Additionally, the latest VC4 DRM driver pull request has landed the kernel-side components for supporting fragment shader threading. Details on that via Threading Support Is In The Works For Raspberry Pi's VC4 Open-Source GPU Driver and this update.

These latest VC4 DRM driver changes were sent in on Wednesday via dri-devel and are already staged now in DRM-Next for when the Linux 4.10 mainline kernel merge window opens in December.