Broadcom's Open-Source VC5 OpenGL & Vulkan Support Improving

Broadcom open-source driver developer Eric Anholt has written his first status update on the VC5 driver activities of the new year.

VC5 is the new Broadcom GPU capable of Vulkan and much greater OpenGL capabilities than the VC4 graphics processor most well known for being within current-generation Raspberry Pi devices. Eric has been working on the bring-up of the open-source VC5 driver stack for the past half-year and he continues making progress on getting the VC5 OpenGL Gallium3D driver closer to parity to the long-standing VC4 driver as well as working on "BCMV" as the new Broadcom Vulkan driver still in its early stages.

On the Vulkan side he's made more progress on image layout handling but most of his attention is still on getting OpenGL going. Eric has fixed a number of VC5 OpenGL bugs, started adding shader_image_load_store support, and fixed a variety of other bugs. Excitingly he has also begun looking at adding compute shader support to VC5.

Those interested in open-source ARM GPU drivers can read about the latest VC5 happenings on Eric's development blog.