Freedreno Gallium3D Is Close To Merging In Mesa

Rob Clark has sent out a revised Freedreno Gallium3D driver that he's hoping to be merged into the mainline Mesa repository. This provides an open-source user-space driver for the Qualcomm Adreno A220 graphics hardware.

The Adreno A220 is the GPU that Qualcomm uses with its Snapdragon S3 SoC. This ARM System-on-Chip with the APQ8060, MSM8260, and MSM8660 parts is found in devices like the HP TouchPad, Samsung Galaxy S II, Samasung Galaxy S Blaze 4G, ASUS Eee Pad Memo, HTC Sensation, Samsung Galaxy Note, and LG Optimus LTE.

The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver project was started by Rob Clark last year while working at Texas Instruments and he's now working for Red Hat. The back-story to Freedreno is covered in An Open-Source Graphics Driver For Snapdragon.

Earlier this month the Freedreno DRM library was merged for the user-space driver to communicate with Qualcomm's obscure kernel graphics driver. (For now Rob is relying upon Qualcom's open-source kernel graphics driver but eventually he may end up writing his own proper Snapdragon KMS/DRM kernel driver.) Now Rob is up to version two on his Freedreno Gallium3D driver he wants merged.

His new patch from yesterday can be found on the Mesa-dev mailing list. This second version incorporates feedback he received from developers on the original Gallium3D driver. "Currently works on a220. Others in the a2xx family look pretty similar and should be pretty straightforward to support with the same driver. The a3xx has a new shader ISA, and while many registers appear similar, the register addresses have been completely shuffled around. I am not sure yet whether it is best to support with the same driver, but different compiler, or whether it should be split into a different driver."