Freedreno User-Space Driver Stack Continues Stabilizing

Rob Clark's work on the open-source Freedreno driver stack the past few years is turning out quite nicely and suitable for end-users wanting an open-source graphics stack for Qualcomm Adreno hardware.

Besides the accomplishment now that even Qualcomm is contributing to this driver that started off as an unofficial, reverse-engineered driver to Adreno's Android driver, the code is panning out quite nicely with now having Adreno A4xx Gallium3D support and various OpenGL improvements.

Coming along in step with the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has been Rob's MSM DRM driver for providing a proper DRM/KMS driver for Adreno display hardware as an alternative to Qualcomm's out-of-tree kernel driver focused on Android. This driver by the TI engineer turned Red Hat developer has been advancing nicely within the Linux kernel.

As the latest sign of things for the Freedreno driver progress, Rob Clark is looking to enable Freedreno support by default within libdrm, the library sitting between the kernel driver and Freedreno Gallium3D. This comes after another patch published by Rob today makes the KGSL support option. The KGSL support is for interfacing with Qualcomm's KGSL driver that's used by vendors primarily on Android, but given the MSM kernel driver is now working great with the mainline Linux kernel, he's disabling KGSL support by default and leaving it to a build-time alternative.

Rob explained on the mailing list, "Now that enabling freedreno doesn't automatically enable kgsl, lets enable it by default. The drm/msm driver has been upstream for a while now, and it's ABI is locked. So I don't think we need to keep calling it experimental."