Freedreno A4xx Improvements Landing In Mesa Git

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freedreno A4xx Improvements Landing In Mesa Git

For those relying on the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support, there are more improvements in Git...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Freedreno-A4xx-July-Better

[zanny]

Just wondering here, since Freedreno is awesome and all. I'm not too big on the mobile hardware front nowadays, mostly because its a giant mess of proprietary broken blobs, but what is stopping me from flashing desktop Linux (something that is going to have these latest Mesas like Archlinux-ARM or something) on my Galaxy S4, which has an Adreno 320 using the Freedreno driver?

I know the modem is still a completely closed black box, I assume I could just use the modem files with modemmanager. Probably a far out assumption. There are also a bunch of io devices in there like the accelerometer, GPS, etc that probably wouldn't work, but I'm mostly wondering whats missing to make the display / touch / sound / hardware buttons work.

[robclark]

Just wondering here, since Freedreno is awesome and all. I'm not too big on the mobile hardware front nowadays, mostly because its a giant mess of proprietary broken blobs, but what is stopping me from flashing desktop Linux (something that is going to have these latest Mesas like Archlinux-ARM or something) on my Galaxy S4, which has an Adreno 320 using the Freedreno driver?

I know the modem is still a completely closed black box, I assume I could just use the modem files with modemmanager. Probably a far out assumption. There are also a bunch of io devices in there like the accelerometer, GPS, etc that probably wouldn't work, but I'm mostly wondering whats missing to make the display / touch / sound / hardware buttons work.

Increasingly less is missing.. traditionally the trouble spot has been downstream display/gpu drivers, since until recently we didn't have much in the way of mipi-dsi support in the upstream drm/kms driver. Last few kernel releases have seen an improvement in drm/msm dsi support, contributed by the qcom display team. This is half of the equation, the other half is panel driver for the lcd panel on $random_android_device, since the upstream drm driver is using the common panel framework (so that panel drivers need only be written once, rather than once per SoC). I'm currently working on writing a panel driver for the AUO 1080p panel in xperia z3. I guess once that is working I should make a blog post documenting how to figure out the init and power-on/off sequences from the downstream kernel, so others can start writing panel drivers for whatever devices they have.