VC4 Gallium3D Thread Switching Work, Reviewing On-Disk Shader Cache

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has issued his first weekly progress report of the new year for the VC4 open-source graphics driver supported by the Raspberry Pi.

Being worked on recently for the VC4 driver include improvements around thread switching, reducing the generated instruction counts, eyeing work on continuous integration testing of the VC4 driver, and he ended his post by mentioning that he's reviewing the Mesa on-disk shader cache patches. Particularly with low-end hardware such as the Raspberry Pi, the OpenGL shader cache work for Mesa could be big win for reducing start-up times and lowering memory consumption. So while all of the Mesa shader cache work so far has revolved around the Intel driver, Eric is looking to make it work in the VC4/Gallium3D space, which is good to hear.

More details on the latest VC4 driver work via this blog post.