Etnaviv

I did spend some time to find the cause for the rendering issues during running some egls2 demos. The fix is a simple one-liner and I would say that GC8xx and GC2000 are ‘equal’ now. That means general work on etnaviv can start now. Currently I am looking in different problem zones and where to start. Update mesa fork Start working on an improved compiler Start working on an kernel interface I think that Rob will start soon on the kernel interface and the mesa update should be doable during some hours. So I think the next big and important step is to improve the compiler. What should I say… I have basic compiler understanding, did wrote a compiler and VM during my study… thats it. I have never written a single line of glsl and I do not completely understand the Vivante GPU. So a perfect starting point for doing some hacking 🙂 The success rate will be quite low and I hope to not lose my motivation too soon.

Here is the first result of running mesatest_gles on mesa&etna: Following tests are showing good visual results compared to swrast: Hello_Triangle/CH02_HelloTriangle Simple_VertexShader/CH08_SimpleVertexShader CubeVBO/cube_vbo ParticleSystem/CH13_ParticleSystem Viewports/viewports All other are visual corrupted or segfault. So there is still some work done to get all demos up and running.

Today I hit an important milestone for etnaviv – an open source user-space driver for the Vivante GCxxx series of embedded GPUs. I finally got GC2000 support to a level that it seems to work. It took me some months to get there. At the beginning it sounds easy to rebuild a ‘driver’ if you get readable command buffer dumps. I did start with working on a simple replay program to render a cube in the same was as the binary blob does it. But what should I say… it is quite boring to do everything by hand and not taking advantage of libetnaviv and the ‘driver’ at all. So I decided to go the hard way and try to fix/add all missing bits until it renders something. The good thing is that I have now some knowledge about the structure of libetnaviv, the dirver and mesa in general. It helps a lot if you know why stuff is done that way. ...