Freedreno Graphics Driver Approaches Mainline

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freedreno Graphics Driver Approaches Mainline

The Freedreno graphics driver that supports reverse-engineered Qualcomm ARM graphics is nearing a state of mainline support within Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwNDI

[duby229]

Yes definitely interested in this project. I have several phones and a pad that use msm graphics. I'm a little confused about what Michael was saying tho... It seems that there is a kernel driver (I'm thinking kernel driver means kms driver) AND a drm driver.... as well as a gallium3d driver and a ddx driver.....

It just seems like there is more complexity than is needed...

The xorg ddx and gallium3d drivers make obvious sense, but I'm a bit confused about the kernel side.... I think there are 2 drivers needed a kms driver and a drm driver. But the way the article is written it doesnt make any of that clear. It says the kernel driver doesnt support kms... And the drm driver uses interfaces from the kernel driver..... But that doesnt make any sense..... When he's talking about kernel driver what exactly does that mean? And same with drm driver?

confused???

[robclark]

Yes definitely interested in this project. I have several phones and a pad that use msm graphics. I'm a little confused about what Michael was saying tho... It seems that there is a kernel driver (I'm thinking kernel driver means kms driver) AND a drm driver.... as well as a gallium3d driver and a ddx driver.....

It just seems like there is more complexity than is needed...

The xorg ddx and gallium3d drivers make obvious sense, but I'm a bit confused about the kernel side.... I think there are 2 drivers needed a kms driver and a drm driver. But the way the article is written it doesnt make any of that clear. It says the kernel driver doesnt support kms... And the drm driver uses interfaces from the kernel driver..... But that doesnt make any sense..... When he's talking about kernel driver what exactly does that mean? And same with drm driver?

confused???

From qcom kernel-msm, we get one non-drm/kms gpu driver (drivers/gpu/msm - /dev/kgsl-*), one fbdev (non-drm/kms) display driver, and one shim drm driver which only supports gem buffers.. basically it gives us a way to share buffers between mesa and ddx via dri2, and nothing more. The drm/gem driver is just a shim on top of the kgsl/msm kernel driver.

It doesn't really make sense.. and has some limitations about proper synchronization between contexts, etc. But it has been "good enough" and lets me run the blob userspace and freedreno userspace side by side, which is useful for comparing behaviour.

[duby229]

Ah, ok. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. I'll be following your progress and am working on getting gentoo booted on an evo4g. I'll be testing on that phone soon.