Qualcomm Adreno 650 + 640 GPUs To Be Supported By Mainline Linux 5.8 Kernel

The crew working on the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno / Google / Code Aurora (Qualcomm) have an interesting batch of changes for this open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware come Linux 5.8.

New hardware to be supported by this open-source MSM driver in Linux 5.8 include Qualcomm's Adreno 405, 640, and 650 series. The Adreno 405 is an old, low-end part from the 400 series and used by the Snapdragon 415/615/616/617 SoCs. The Adreno 405 support isn't particularly exciting but it's there for those interested along with the relevant MSM8x36 changes to the MDP5 code.

The Adreno 640 and 650 support meanwhile is much more interesting. The Adreno 640 is the GPU found within the Snapdragon 855/855+ and the Adreno 650 is found within the Snapdragon 865. The Snapdragon 855 is used by the Samsung Galaxy S10 series, OnePlus 7, Google Pixel 4/XL, ASUS ROG Phone 2, and countless others. The Snapdragon 865 is what powers the Samsung Galaxy S20 series, OnePlus 8, and many other modern devices. This Adreno 640/650 series builds off the existing support and does have open-source OpenGL support via Freedreno as well as open-source Vulkan via the still-maturing TURNIP driver.

MSM updates for Linux 5.8 also include clock and bandwidth scaling in the DPU code, color processing support, preparations for per-context page-tables (not yet filly wired up), and a submit ioctl to support synchronization objects.

More details on these MSM DRM driver updates slated for Linux 5.8 via this pull request.