It's been a while since last having major progress to report on the Broadcom VideoCore 4 (VC4) open-source driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi boards or the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore "V3D" driver stack. The lack of recent progress has been due to lead developer Eric Anholt being away on paternity leave, but he is back now with another update on this open-source ARM graphics undertaking.

While in his limited time working he has been addressing some OpenGL ES conformance test suite failures with the VC4 Gallium3D driver, he did manage to score a big win for the texture upload/download performance.

For particularly benefiting SDL games/applications that don't rely upon OpenGL and thus the X11 performance with GLAMOR comes into play, he's made a significant performance boost by ensuring the windows were aligned to tiles and thus avoiding some inefficient operations. In some x11perf benchmarks he has seen boosts ranging from 2% to 383% faster. A follow-up patch yielded another 12% improvement on texture upload performance.

Eric has also fixed a number of other VC4 and V3D driver bugs as outlined in his latest status update.