Note This blog post is part 1 of a series of blog posts about isaspec and its usage in the etnaviv GPU stack. I will add here links to the other blog posts, once they are published. The first time I heard about isaspec, I was blown away by the possibilities it opens. I am really thankful that Igalia made it possible to complete this crucial piece of core infrastructure for the etnaviv GPU stack....
Trusting hardware, particularly the registers that describe its functionality, is fundamentally risky. tl;dr The etnaviv GPU stack is continuously improving and becoming more robust. This time, a hardware database was incorporated into Mesa, utilizing header files provided by the SoC vendors. If you are interested in the implementation details, I recommend checking out this Mesa MR. Are you employed at Versilicon and want to help? You could greatly simplify our work by supplying the community with a comprehensive header that includes all the models you offer....
Holidays are here and I have time to look back at 2023. For six months I have been working for Igalia and what should I say? I ❤️ it! This was the best decision to leave my comfort zone of a normal 9-5 job. I am so proud to work on open source GPU drivers and I am able to spend much of my work time on etnaviv. Driver maintenance Before adding any new feature I thought it would be great idea to improve the current state of etnaviv’s gallium driver....
You might be familiar with mesamatrix - a nice site to track the state of all GPU drivers provided by Mesa. Ohh.. did I say all? Let’s have a closer look: This page is a graphical representation of the text file docs/features.txt from the Mesa repository. So wouldn’t it be sick to get etnaviv mentioned in docs/features.txt and onto the matrix? First mesamatrix needs to know/support etnaviv. This seems to be quite simple as there is already a pull request to add a bunch of embedded GPU drivers: Add VC4,VC5 and Vivante GPUs...
After years of hard work the etnaviv team reached an other very important milestone. The gallium driver and the renderonly library got pushed into mesa’s git repository and will be released with mesa 17.0 - yeah! This does not mean we are done with development at all. There are many interesting topics to work on and some of them like better support for newer IP cores or a reworked GLSL compiler should see the light of day during the next months....