Raspberry Pi VC4 Works On ETC1 Support, Power Management Tweaks

Eric Anholt at Broadcom continues to be busy hacking on the open-source VC4 DRM+Gallium3D stack for providing fully open-source Raspberry Pi graphics stack support.

Some of the work covered the past week includes work on supporting ETC1 texture compression with this free driver. The kernel-side validation needed for ETC1 texture compression in the VC4 DRM driver should happen for Linux 4.10.

Also exciting is work being done on reducing the overhead due to power management, which has kept the Raspberry Pi's CPU 1~3.5% busy in some situations.

Eric's also been making progress on HDMI audio support for the open-source VC4 driver as another feature that's long been supported by their binary blob stack but not by the fully-open VC4 code.

More details on the latest Raspberry Pi open-source driver improvements via Eric's blog.