Posted on 05/06/2017 by Robert Foss
Share this post:
GPUs like those of Intel and Vivante support storing the contents of graphical buffers in different formats. Support for describing these formats using modifiers has now been added to Android and Mesa, enabling tiling artifact free running of Android on the iMX6 platform.
With modifier support added to Mesa and gbm_gralloc, it is now possible to boot Android on iMX6 platforms using no proprietary blobs at all. This makes iMX6 one of the very few embedded SOCs that needs no blobs at all to run.
Not only is that a great win for Open Source in general, but it also makes the iMX6 more attractive as a platform. A further positive point is that this lays the groundwork for the iMX8 platform, and supporting it will come much easier.
Modifiers are used to represent different properties of buffers. These properties can cover a range of different information about a buffer, for example compression and tiling.
For the case of the iMX6 and the Vivante GPU which it is equipped with, the modifiers are related to tiling. The reason being that buffers can be tiled in different ways (Tiled, Super Tiled, etc.) or not at all (Linear). Before sending buffers out to a display, they need to have the associated tiling information made available, so that the actual image that is being sent out is not tiled.
Support was added in two places; Mesa and gbm_gralloc. Mesa has had support added to many of the buffer allocation functions and to GBM (which is the API provided by Mesa, that gbm_gralloc uses).
gbm_gralloc in turn had support added for using a new GBM API call, GBM_BO_IMPORT_FD_MODIFIER, which imports a buffer object as well as accompanying information like modifier used by the buffer object in question.
Currently the modifiers work is in the process of being upstreamed, but in the meantime it can be found here. If you'd like to test this out yourself a How-To can be found here.
This work is built on efforts by a lot people:
This post has been a part of work undertaken by my employer Collabora, and has been funded by Zodiac Inflight Innovations.
13/03/2019
During the past few months significant progress has been made on the Open Source Arm Mali GPU driver front, culminating in the Panfrost…
12/03/2019
With just a few simple steps, you can compile and boot a Raspberry Pi using the Linux kernel mainline source code. Here's how.
05/03/2019
Since the last Debian release, a number of changes have been made in the Debian Cloud Team, both on the technical & organisational level…
04/03/2019
Following two months of work to develop a new kernel driver for Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, the kernel side of Panfrost is now in a form close…
18/02/2019
A look at how to implement USB gadget devices on Linux machines which have the necessary UDC hardware, automate the manual configfs process…
15/02/2019
From the latest on Open Source projects Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) and VirGL (virtual 3D GPU for QEMU), to a state of the union on GStreamer…
Whether writing a line of code or shaping a longer-term strategic software development plan, we'll help you navigate the ever-evolving world of Open Source.
한국어 버전의 Collabora.com 보기
Acesse Collabora.com em Português
Comments (0)
Add a Comment