Freedesktop on Christian Gmeiner

GLES3 on etnaviv: Fixing the Hard Parts

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the start of a series about getting OpenGL ES 3.0 conformance on Vivante GC7000 hardware using the open-source etnaviv driver in Mesa. Thanks to Igalia for giving me the opportunity to spend some time on these topics.

Where We Are

etnaviv has supported GLES2 on Vivante GPUs for a long time. GLES3 support has been progressing steadily, but the remaining dEQP failures are the stubborn ones - the cases where the hardware doesn’t quite do what the spec says, and the driver has to get creative.

My first Vulkan extension

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After years of working on etnaviv - a Gallium/OpenGL driver for Vivante GPUs - I’ve been wanting to get into Vulkan. As part of my work at Igalia, the goal was to bring VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced to lavapipe. But rather than going straight there, I started with Honeykrisp - the Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon - as a first target: a real hardware driver to validate the implementation against before wiring it up in a software renderer. My first Vulkan extension, and my first real contribution to Honeykrisp.

Multiple Render Targets for etnaviv

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Modern graphics programming revolves around achieving high-performance rendering and visually stunning effects. Among OpenGL’s capabilities, Multiple Render Targets (MRTs) are particularly valuable for enabling advanced rendering techniques with greater efficiency.

With the latest release of Mesa 24.03 and the commitment from Igalia, the etnaviv GPU driver now includes support for MRTs. If you’ve ever wondered how MRTs can transform your graphics pipeline or are curious about the challenges of implementing this feature, this blog post is for you.

CI-Tron: A Long Road to a Better Board Farm

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big supporter of finding problems before they get into the code base. The earlier you catch issues, the easier they are to fix. One of the main tools that helps with this is a Continuous Integration (CI) farm. A CI farm allows you to run extensive tests like deqp or piglit on a merge request or even on a private git branch before any code is merged, which significantly helps catch problems early.

It All Started With a Nop - Part I

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note

hwdb - The only truth

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Year 2023 in Retrospect

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:03:20 -0800

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. Therefor I reworked some general driver code to be more consistent and to have a more modern feeling, and made it possible to drop some hand-rolled conversion helpers by switching to already existing solutions (U_FIXED(..), S_FIXED(..), float_to_ubyte(..)).