Freedreno Gallium3D Now Exposes Adreno A5xx Performance Counters

It's been a while since last having any news to report on Freedrenon, the open-source, community-driven Gallium3D driver for providing accelerated 3D support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. But ahead of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 feature freeze, Freedreno founder Rob Clark has been landing a number of improvements.

The latest to report on for Freedreno Gallium3D is support for performance counters on Adreno A5xx series hardware. These performance counters are now wired up following the infrastructure work over several patches on Wednesday. These hardware performance counters are being exposed to user-space OpenGL applications through the AMD_performance_monitor extension.

The AMD_performance_monitor extension is now widely used across driver vendors as a means of easily exposing these hardware counters to OpenGL debuggers/analytics for reading more insight about the state of the graphics hardware during the rendering operations.

This A5xx performance counter support will be part of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 release. It's also with this upcoming quarterly feature release where Freedreno is at OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance and nearly desktop OpenGL 3.3. Freedreno and VC4 continue to be two of the best examples of fully open-source ARM graphics drivers.