Etnaviv Gallium3D Driver Now Wiring Up ASTC Texture Compression

The Etnaviv open-source driver stack providing reverse-engineered Vivante Linux graphics driver support continues on its feature streak.

Some of the recent successes in the past several days for the Etnaviv driver have included Vivante GC7000 series patches for supporting this newer hardware, OpenGL 2.1 support, plans for eventually supporting OpenCL, and more.

The latest work now is on handling ASTC texture compression. Etnaviv contributor Wladimir J. van der Laan sent out patches on Wednesday for wiring up ASTC compression with supported hardware, currently it's working on GC3000 on i.MX6qp.

Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) has been available with OpenGL for the past number of years for this algorithm originally developed at ARM. On desktop hardware, ASTC is supported by Skylake and newer and NVIDIA with Kepler and newer. Unlike S3TC, ASTC is not encumbered by patents.