Broadcom Driver VC5 Instruction Scheduler Coming Together

Eric Anholt at Broadcom continues working on the VC5 driver stack that should yield next-generation graphics for future Broadcom SoCs, some of which will hopefully make it into future Raspberry Pi revisions.

In his latest weekly blog post covering the development work on VC5 and VC4 (the open-source driver for existing Broadcom graphics hardware, including what's in all the Raspberry Pi models), it turns out most of his effort the past week was on the VC5 instruction scheduler.

With the VC5 QPU instruction scheduler, things are beginning to take shape for this code-base that's derived from the VC4 driver, which in turn is derived from Intel's open-source driver as that's what Anholt had the most experience with in previously being an Intel Linux developer. The scheduler in its early form is able to drop the number of instructions needed by about 38%, but some regressions are pending.

He's also been tackling other open-source driver improvements as outlined via his GitHub blog.