Gallium3D's Freedreno Driver Gets A New Compiler

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 4 February 2014 at 12:42 AM EST. 15 Comments
MESA
Rob Clark has landed a new shader compiler into his Freedreno Gallium3D open-source graphics driver for Qualcomm's Adreno A3xx hardware.

Rob explained with the new commit landing the fresh compiler, "The new compiler generates a dependency graph of instructions, including a few meta-instructions to handle PHI and preserve some extra information needed for register assignment, etc...At this point, thanks to proper handling of instruction scheduling, the new compiler fixes a lot of things that were broken before, and does not appear to break anything that was working before. So even though it is not finished, it seems useful to merge it in it's current state."

Other changes also hit Mesa on Monday for wiring up the new graphics driver compiler.

Overall, Freedreno with its open-source mainline DRM driver in the Linux kernel and its mainline Mesa Gallium3D driver continues to be a shining example of open-source (reverse-engineered) ARM Linux graphics driver support.
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