VC5 Gallium3D OpenGL Driver Is Starting To Get Fit

Broadcom's Eric Anholt has remained busy in bringing up the VC5 Gallium3D driver.

Anholt has added occlusion query support to this driver for next-gen Broadcom graphics hardware as well as improving the debugging output, fixing some crashes, and fixing other OpenGL functionality with this driver. It's been a busy time for him in bringing up this new driver stack as well as continuing to maintain the VC4 driver that continues to be most notably used by the current range of Raspberry Pi ARM boards.

Within Mesa Git currently, the VC5 Gallium3D driver is in-tree but doesn't yet work on actual hardware as it's not yet tied into the new, still-developing VC5 DRM driver. The VC5 DRM kernel driver remains not yet merged to the mainline kernel and thus in Mesa is currently just this rudimentary OpenGL driver support.

It will certainly be interesting to see where VC5 goes in 2018 as Eric is also pursuing OpenCL and Vulkan support too and then what hardware we end up finding the VC5. The latest OpenGL fixes/improvements to this driver are outlined via twivc4 and the Mesa Git log.