According to this article from Michael Larabel on Phoronix.com, “Lucas Stach has sent in the Etnaviv DRM driver changes to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.15 kernel…”
This is a great news for the Librem 5 project (if they will use the 4.15 or above Linux kernel) mainly because this new code “includes landing GPU performance counter support, which is important for developers in being able to analyze/tune the performance.”.
It is already a great achivement that the funding phase has reached the initial goal but knowing that the all software’s stack will greatly improve in the coming year makes me think that even the Purism folks will be astonished by the result of what they did.
I am really confident that this project will be a real break through in the Open Source history.
Thank you for the pointer, that is indeed great news!
It is still quite some time until we fix things down. Currently we aim for being as mainline as possible but we have to align that with the other requirements as we get them in. Currently we are using 4.13.5 on our i.MX6 development setups and will move on to 4.14 once it is released.
If we upgrade to i.MX8M, which we all hope for, we need to see how good its kernel support will be and based on which version. Maybe we will not be able to supply most recent mainline kernel right from the start but we will be working towards it, promised.
“Etnaviv OpenCL support may also prove interesting as Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone is slated to use the Etnaviv driver and this would allow for OpenCL support from this privacy-minded GNU/Linux smartphone.”
“That’s now in place for Mesa 17.4-dev while their next big milestone will be OpenGL 3.0 with much more work ahead. Most Vivante GC hardware is capable of OpenGL ES 3.1 / OpenGL 3.0 / OpenCL 1.2.”
This last one is probably the most important one for us because and I quote:
“This is especially important if the Purism Librem 5 smartphone ends up shipping with an i.MX8 SoC and will need the GC7000 series graphics support.”
How cool is that, eh?
I’d like to thank Michael Larabel creator/writer/maintainer of the phoronix website for gathering and providing all these informations to us. For those who doesn’t know Phoronix, it is simply the place to go for getting up-to-date informations related to the FLOSS world.
I also would like to thank all the Devs and companies that are working so hard to give us the opportunity to unchained ourself from all of those “big brother” narrow minded companies…
For those interested, this event starts on next tuesday 27/02/2018 (my birthday ) and will last until the 01/03/2018 in Nuremberg, Germany. There are also plenty of other very intersting subjects on the program.
