Robert Foss from Collabora was again at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit this week to present the latest state of the art in open source graphics drivers for embedded applications.

GPU drivers

As you should all know, the embedded open source graphics drivers have improved greatly, especially with Broadcom VC4/V3D, Freedreno for Qualcomm Adreno and more recently with Panfrost for newer Arm Mali hardware, as well as other reverse-engineered driver options such as Etnaviv for Vivante Graphics IP.

Progress has been made this year in supporting new hardware and all of these various open source driver projects have made good progress, though generally not in terms of functionality or performance parity with their proprietary, official drivers from the various hardware vendors.

During the presentation in San Diego, Robert Foss touched on this topic of increasing importance. Much of OpenGL has been displaced by the prominent drivers, and that speaks well for OpenCL. There are no significant, let alone good OpenCL implementations of these embedded drivers yet, but along with the Mesa stack with Clover, NIR support, etc., progress is being made, so 2020 should be more interesting.

Robert’s presentation on embedded open source graphics drivers at this time can be found here.

The Collabora developer also presented an article about the state of Panfrost for modern open source arm graphics. On the Panfrost front, where Collabora sponsors much of the work, they are aiming for greater OpenGL support, more GPU capability, better performance, and finally OpenCL and Vulkan.

Thank you for your visit.