Etnaviv Gallium3D Implements Enough To Expose OpenGL 2, Run Ioquake3

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 18 January 2017 at 04:03 PM EST. 17 Comments
MESA
Adding to the list of Mesa 17.0 features is enough functionality in the reverse-engineered Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for running OpenGL 2.0 games.

Etnaviv, of course, being the reverse-engineered driver stack for Vivante graphics cores consisting of the in-kernel DRM/KMS driver, libdrm, and the recently-merged Gallium3D code.

The Etnaviv driver is new to Mesa 17.0 and now it's coming with just enough desktop OpenGL support for v2.0. This commit today exposes fake occlusion query support. Wladimir van der Laan explains, "This is necessary to get Mesa to report desktop GL 2.0 support (to run exciting things such as ioq3's OpenGL 2 renderer), and should be valid because exposing the capability does not guarantee that any counters are actually implemented."


One of the more unique games powered by ioquake3.


So now Etnaviv can at least handle ioquake3! The Vivante cores supported by this current open-source community driver include the GC880, GC1000, GC2000, and GC3000. The hardware is capable of OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0 but could be some time before this driver supports all the necessary extensions given it's being developed by a limited number of community developers via reverse-engineering.
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