Freedreno Graphics Driver Reaches Version 1.0
Rob Clark, formerly of Texas Instruments and now at Red Hat, has been working on his Freedreno pet project for more than the past year. This reverse-engineering task has been about providing a fully open-source Qualcomm ARM graphics driver.
Rob had been writing a Freedreno Gallium3D driver, which has since been merged into mainline Mesa master and serves as one of the best ARM Mesa/Gallium3D drivers out there. He also then wrote xf86-video-freedreno to provide X.Org Server support for Qualcomm graphics with most of Qualcomm's focus just being on Android and thus without X.Org support. Then most recently Rob wrote a Freedreno DRM driver to replace Qualcomm's open-source kernel driver that targets Android interfaces.
The Freedreno Gallium3D driver is mainline, the DRM library (libdrm) support is in place, the Freedreno (MSM) DRM driver is in the mainline Linux kernel, and now Rob Clark has completed the puzzle with the release of xf86-video-freedreno 1.0.
The xf86-video-freedreno 1.0.0 release has basic EXA acceleration support, DRI2 capabilities, DRI2 page-flipping, and is compatible with the DRM/KMS kernel driver. The Freedreno driver supports using the XA Gallium3D state tracker as well as the Z180 2D core. The hardware support targets the A2xx and A3xx GPUs. With the Linux 3.13 kernel driver there is also now PRIME and Render Nodes support.
When it comes to the state of open-source ARM graphics drivers on Linux, Freedreno is basically the best and is a great example and done via reverse-engineering without the official support of Qualcomm. The open-source Freedreno driver provides OpenGL and OpenGL ES support and can run games like Xonotic while also handling the GNOME Shell and XBMC. The Freedreno stack is also compatible with Wayland/Weston.
The xf86-video-freedreno 1.0 release announcement can be read on the X.Org mailing list.
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