Linux 5.8 Will Light Up The Adreno 405 / 640 / 650 GPUs On Open-Source

Last week saw the main Direct Rendering Manager driver updates for Linux 5.8 with a lot on the open-source graphics front while a secondary pull request was submitted today with the Freedreno "MSM" DRM driver changes for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver implementation.

Most significant with the open-source MSM driver updates for Linux 5.8 are the Adreno 405, 640, and 650 GPUs are now supported. The Adreno 405 is quite old from the Snapdragon 415/615/616/617 days, but the Adreno 640/650 are at least still more relevant in being current-generation hardware.

The Adreno 640 provides the graphics for the Snapdragon 855/855+ and the Adreno 650 is within the Snapdragon 865. The Snapdragon 855 is used by the Samsung Galaxy S10 series, OnePlus 7, Google Pixel 4/XL, ASUS ROG Phone 2, and countless others. The Snapdragon 865 is what powers the Samsung Galaxy S20 series, OnePlus 8, and many other modern devices.

Meanwhile the Adreno OpenGL/Vulkan drivers continue progressing on the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver side with Freedreno Gallium3D and TURNIP, respectively, both of which see new work in Mesa 20.2-devel.

With the MSM driver changes there is this expanded Adreno support along with color processing abilities in the DPU code, preparing for per-context pagetables, user-space ABI update for supporting synchronization objects, and other changes.