More progress is being made in the area of i.MX6, etnaviv and Android.

Since the last post a lot work has gone into upstreaming and stabilizing the etnaviv on Android ecosystem. This has involved Android, kernel and Mesa changes. Many of which are available upstream now. A How-To for getting you up and running on an iMX6 dev board is available here.

Improvements

Modifiers support

Modifiers support has been accepted into Mesa, GBM and gbm_gralloc. Modifiers were mentioned in a previous post.

Etnaviv driver support for Android

Patches enabling the etnaviv Mesa driver being built for Android have now landed upstream.

Stability on Android

A number for small stability issues present while running Android on i.MX6 hardware have now been fixed, and the platform is now relatively stable.

Performance diagnostics

We have a decent understanding that the platform is slow when running the desktop and other apps that have multiple surfaces due to rendering using CPU instead of GPU (Probably not relevant for the blog entry.)

Etnaviv improvements

Etnaviv performance and feature set have both been increased since Mesa v17.1.

EGL support

A number of games using EGL have been successfully run on Android, some minor graphical issues still remain, but overall games run well and fast.

Thanks

This work is built on efforts by a lot people:

• Aleksander Morgado - Independent
• Daniel Stone - Collabora
• Christian Gmeiner - Independent
• Emil Velikov - Collabora
• Lucas Stach - Pengutronix
• Rob Herring - Linaro
• Varad Gautam - Collabora
• Wladimir Van Der Laan - Independent

This post has been a part of work undertaken by my employer Collabora, and has been funded by Zodiac Inflight Innovations.

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