Month: January 2020

So continuing with the news, here is a fairly recent one: as the tile states, I am happy to announce that the Raspberry Pi 4 is now an OpenGL ES 3.1 conformant product!. This means that the Mesa V3D driver has successfully passed a whole lot of tests designed to validate the OpenGL ES 3.1 feature set, which should be a good sign of driver quality and correctness.

It should be noted that the Raspberry Pi 4 shipped with a V3D driver exposing OpenGL ES 3.0, so this also means that on top of all the bugfixes that we implemented for conformance, the driver has also gained new functionality! Particularly, we merged Eric’s previous work to enable Compute Shaders.

All this work has been in Mesa master since December (I believe there is only one fix missing waiting for us to address review feedback), and will hopefully make it to Raspberry Pi 4 users soon.

I actually landed this in Mesa back in December but never got to announce it anywhere. The implementation passes all the tests available in the Khronos Conformance Tests Suite (CTS). If you give this a try and find any bugs, please report them here with the V3D tag.

This is also the first large feature I land in V3D! Hopefully there will be more coming in the future.

Yeah… this blog post is well overdue, but better late than never! So yes, I am currently working on progressing the Raspberry Pi 4 Mesa driver stack, together with my Igalian colleagues Piñeiro and Chema, continuing the fantastic work started by Eric Anholt on the Mesa V3D driver.

The Raspberry Pi 4 sports a Video Core VI GPU that is capable of OpenGL ES 3.2, so it is a big update from the Raspberry Pi 3, which could only do OpenGL ES 2.0. Another big change with the Raspberry Pi 4 is that the Mesa v3d driver is the driver used by default with Raspbian. Because both GPUs are quite different, Eric had to write an all new driver for the Raspberry Pi 4, and that is why there are two drivers in Mesa: the VC4 driver is for the Raspberry Pi 3, while the V3D driver targets the Raspberry Pi 4.

As for what we have been working on exactly, I wrote a long post on the Raspberry Pi blog some months ago with a lot of the details, but for those looking for the quick summary:

• Shader compiler optimizations.
• Significant Transform Feedback fixes and improvements.
• Implemented OpenGL Logic Operations.
• A bunch of bugfixes for Piglit test failures.
• Set up a Continuous Integration system to identify regressions.
• Rebased and merge Eric’s work on Compute Shaders.
• Many bug fixes targeting the Khronos OpenGL ES Conformance Test Suite (CTS).

So that’s it for the late news. I hope to do a better job keeping this blog updated with the news this year, and to start with that I will be writing a couple of additional posts to highlight a few significant development milestones we achieved recently, so stay tuned for more!