As promised in my previous post, now there is an f19 installer for nexus4: https://github.com/freedreno/nexus4-fedora So if you have an n4 and a bit of free space, you can play around with accelerated open-source gpu goodness :-)
gallium/freedreno + xf86-video-freedreno using XA gallium state tracker on fedora F18. Gnome-shell, compiz, xonontic, ioquake all work. Just need to clean up the patches for XA and freedreno a bit more before they are ready for upstream. And hopefully in the next couple days I'll have some time to put together a sort of make-shift installer for anyone else who wants to try.
So, I've been working on the freedreno gallium support for adreno a3xx for the past few weeks or so, and now it is starting to take shape:
The full video here. The code is on the a3xx branch on github.. still has a ways got go before I'm ready to go upstream with it, but now we're getting into the fun bits :-) Special thanks to Benjamin Tissoires for getting the touchscreen going for me on the nexus4.
A while back, I got my shiny new nexus4 in order to start playing with the new a320 adreno gpu. It turns out, there are some quite significant changes in the new generation, in particular new shader ISA and all the registers around shader setup. Other registers are mostly shuffled around, with a few new registers for new features (like MRT) and a few tweaks here and there. There is quite a lot more flexibility in the shader ISA (thank-you opencl), and some nice changes like moving vertex fetch out of the shader and a lot more flexibility in the positioning of outputs/varyings. Although as a result there was more that needed to be figured out to setup the shader related registers compared to a2xx. At this point, I'm working with simple "fdre-a3xx" tests. Basically libfdre (freedreno reverse engineering) gives a very simplified gl-ish API, with shaders written in assembly, rather than full on GLSL compiler. I've got a pretty good shader assembler/disassembler, and cmdstream parsing utilizing envytools/librnn for parsing the register values. There is still some more work to do at the fdre level (depth, stencil, textures) before work on the gallium driver can start, but things are progressing well.
After fixing a handful of bugs, and adding support (still in a slightly hacky way) for some desktop GL (1.4) features (namely, GL_QUADS), I've got gnome-shell working with freedreno:
Full video here I've also made a sort of fedora F18 installer for the touchpad, for anyone out there who wants to give it a spin:
Last weekend was fosdem, where I showed a few more things working on freedreno (compiz, q3a). The recording of the talk is provided by phoronix. Although unfortunately the mic was closer to the audience than me (and I'm not really a loud speaker), and the camera remained pointed at the projector while I was showing the demo, so you miss the exciting bits. So I re-ran the demo and captured it with my advanced cinematic skillz, and without the backlight hickups which plagued the original demo (but had nothing to do with freedreno... have I mentioned before that drivers/video/msm is made of fail?).
Full video here. I still need to fix support for mip-map textures (which you may have noticed in the q3a part), and there are a couple rendering bugs with the unity plugin in compiz, but at least the other compiz plugins I've tried so far seem fine. Until now I have not put much (or really, any) focus on performance and there is definitely some low hanging fruit on the performance front. Unfortunately some of the issues, like proper synchronization between xorg and gl/dri2 client, and flipping rather than doing fullscreen presentation blits, will I think require a proper drm kernel driver. Although I suspect there is room for some compiler optimization and a few other things.
Just a quick update, and a sneak-peak at what is in store for FOSDEM. The freedreno gallium driver has made a lot of progress since the last post (sorry, been too busy hacking to blog about it). But now finally xbmc is working with freedreno:
Full video here. Special thanks to Ricardo Salveti for building a working version of xbmc for 12.10. You can find it in his PPA.
