Initial Gallium3D VC5 Driver Merged Into Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 10 October 2017 at 08:49 PM EDT. 14 Comments
MESA
The initial "VC5" Gallium3D driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware has been merged into mainline Mesa.

This is the initial VC5 OpenGL driver component for next-gen Broadcom graphics with this open-source driver being worked on by Eric Anholt. VC5 is a big upgrade over the existing VC4 architecture in that it supports modern OpenGL desktop features, OpenCL compute, and even Vulkan. VC5 also has an IOMMU and other goodies over the VC4 GPU most notably found within current generation Raspberry Pi boards.

Eric has been working on the VC5 bring-up the past several months. Being merged today is just the Gallium3D driver. Note that with this early code it isn't yet suitable for end-users but for now just works with the simulator until the VC5 DRM driver is in place with the mainline Linux kernel and its interfaces settled, before supporting that within VC5 in Mesa. As well, Eric has done some early VC5 Vulkan hacking based upon the RADV/ANV driver components, but that isn't yet merged.

VC5 is initially to be found with the BCM7268 SoC. This initial code merge includes the updated NIR compiler and close to 20,000 lines of new driver code in general.

The code landed earlier today across a number of commits.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week