The Etnaviv Open-Source Driver Is Quietly Making Progress

Besides the highly sought after Nouveau status update and AMDGPU/Vulkan update, Lucas Stach talked today at XDC2015 Toronto about his work on the Etnaviv reverse-engineered driver.

Etnaviv continues to be focused on providing a full, reverse-engineered 2D/3D graphics driver for the Vivante graphics processor in the ARM SoC space. Developers involved have been significantly reworking a kernel driver, replacing the 65K lines of code Vivante kernel driver with a new 6.5k L.O.C. kernel driver, and begun implementing a Mesa driver along with related components line an X.Org DDX for 2D and libdrm for communication with the kernel.

The current Etnaviv Mesa driver is able to run "simple applications" like Quake 3, but this code hasn't yet been merged and has work items like removing FBDEV dependencies and cleaning up state validation/emisssion.

Those wanting to learn more about the reverse-engineered Etnaviv open-source graphics driver can see these PDF slides. It's great to hear work on this driver persisting since it's been a while since last talking about it.