Lima Gets Tiling While Vulkan Turnip Lands SSBO + Compute Shaders

Even with the holidays fast approaching Mesa developers continue to be quite busy in landing new features ahead of next quarter's Mesa 20.0 release. The Lima Gallium3D driver and Turnip Vulkan driver are the latest benefiting from the Git code.

The Lima Gallium3D driver that supports older Mali 400/450 hardware with an open-source OpenGL driver hasn't been seeing too many improvements these days compared to the likes of the Panfrost Gallium3D driver for the newer Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard architectures. But hitting Mesa 20.0-devel yesterday was tiling support for Lima. This should improve the performance for this open-source Mali driver and also end up working around the driver's broken mipmapping support for linear textures.

TURNIP is the other driver with some fun changes at the tip of Git. TURNIP is the open-source Vulkan driver for newer Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware and is worked on by Google folks and others. TURNIP now supports compute shaders and SSBO (Shader Storage Buffer Object). These latest TURNIP changes are from Eric Anholt who jumped ship recently from Broadcom to Google.

This and plenty of other work is building up for Mesa 20.0 that should be out around the end of February or early March.