Etnaviv Driver Sends Out Patches For Vivante GC7000 Support

The developers behind the open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv KMS+Gallium3D driver stack for Vivante graphics support have been very busy recently.

Etnaviv just recently reached OpenGL 2.0 support and then this week cleared OpenGL 2.1 support and now patches have emerged bringing up Vivante GC7000 series hardware support within their Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

The Vivante GC7000 series is what's used in the likes of the NXP i.MX8Quad, Marvel PXA1908/PXA1936, and is their latest-generation Vivante hardware. This is especially important if the Purism Librem 5 smartphone ends up shipping with an i.MX8 SoC and will need the GC7000 series graphics support.

At the top-end, the GC7600 series supports up to 256 shader cores or on the low-end is the GC7000 UltraLite with just 8 shader cores. The GC7000 series is capable of OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan, and OpenCL 1.2.

The initial 19 patches preparing for GC7000 series support can be found as of yesterday on Mesa-dev. With these patches games like ioquake3 and DarkPlaces are running, but there is also the kernel bits to still get in place for this newer Vivante hardware. This initial prep support in Mesa for GC7000 is around three thousand lines of code.