More Mesa Work Coming Out Of Imagination Tech?

While many Phoronix readers cringe when hearing "Imagination Tech" or "PowerVR" due to past Linux driver issues and the lack of a full-featured open-source driver, one of their developers is now requesting commit rights to Mesa.

Going back 2+ years we've heard of ImgTech trying to become more open-source friendly and they were looking to hire open-source developers for working on a graphics stack. That job description back in 2015 included mentions of Mesa, Wayland and DRI/DRM. We haven't seen too many open-source contributions out of Imagination yet for Linux graphics and no long-awaited open driver, but perhaps 2017 is the year that will change?

Imagination developer Eric Engestrom is now requesting commit rights for Mesa. According to his personal site, he's been working at Imagination since August 2015 where he's been "developing the Linux driver for the PowerVR family of GPUs."

Engestrom isn't brand new to the Mesa community but we have seen him reviewing patches pertaining to Mesa on Android (among other areas) and even adding basic patches to RADV and ANV. He has around 50 commits currently in Mesa, mostly they are fixes to different components.

In January there's been 16 messages from Eric Engestrom on the Mesa mailing list. Going back several months he's been making usually a dozen or two comments on the Mesa mailing list per month, usually reviewing patches, along with sending some basic patches of his own. Usually his sign-offs are with his Imagination Tech email address. Now he's requesting an account for commit access to Mesa.

There's no official confirmation yet (their PR contact who had proven useful and was communicating about Linux efforts, left the company in August) that Imagination will be opening up some PowerVR Gallium3D driver or so, but will be interesting to see where their contributions lead in 2017.