Threading Support Is In The Works For Raspberry Pi's VC4 Open-Source GPU Driver

The VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for notably supporting the Raspberry Pi Broadcom SoCs is nearing support for threading as another potential performance win.

On Saturday, VC4 lead developer Eric Anholt posted drm/vc4 threading support with work originally done by Jonas Pfeil. This less than 100 lines of code provides support for threaded fragment shaders within the kernel DRM driver.

That patch is currently residing on the dri-devel mailing list while it will potentially be merged in time for Linux 4.10.

Following that were several VC4 Gallium3D driver related patches in Mesa for threaded support. There's a few hundred lines of changes across several commits in Mesa Git now for supporting threaded fragment shaders in the VC4 driver. It will be interesting to see how this affects the performance for the Raspberry Pi open-source graphics driver.