Etnaviv Gallium3D Now Working On NIR Support

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D graphics driver support for Vivante graphics hardware is currently pursuing NIR intermediate representation support.

Philipp Zabel is one of multiple Pengutronix developers working on this open-source Etnaviv driver stack. He shared on Tuesday that they have been working on NIR support for a while, the new intermediate representation brought up over the past few years initially for the Intel Mesa driver and has since expanded to VC4, Freedreno, and optionally the RadeonSI driver as part of their SPIR-V support.

Etnaviv is working on NIR support in order to share optimizations, better support different code transformations, better register allocation, and the hope of OpenCL/SPIR-V support in the future.

Zabel has posted initial patches for bringing up NIR support within Etnaviv Gallium3D, but it's still very much a work-in-progress and will require a great deal more work before it's mainlined.

The 21 patches and more details on their NIR work can be found via this Mesa-dev thread. This is good news especially for those holding out hope for the Librem 5 smart-phone, which is using an i.MX8 SoC and is expected to rely upon the Etnaviv driver -- a mature Etnaviv driver would be needed for delivering OpenCL and SPIR-V/Vulkan support, though that's probably quite unlikely for hitting ahead of the initial phones shipping in January.