2024 Graphics Team Contributions at Igalia

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2024 has been an exciting year for the Igalia’s Graphics +Team. We’ve been making a lot of progress on Turnip, AMD display +driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics stack, Vulkan video, and more.

Vulkan Device Generated +Commands

Igalia’s Ricardo Garcia has been working hard on adding support for +the new VK_EXT_device_generated_commands extension in the +Vulkan Conformance Test Suite. He wrote an excellent blog post on the +extension and on his work that you can read here. Ricardo also +presented the extension at XDC 2024 in Montréal, which he also blogged about. Take a look +and see what generating Vulkan commands directly on the GPU looks +like!

Raspberry Pi +Enhancements & Performance Improvements

Our very own Maíra Canal made a big contribution to improve the +graphics performance of Raspberry Pi 4 & 5 devices by introducing +support for “Super Pages”. She wrote an excellent and detailed blog post +on what Super Pages are, how they improve performance, and comparing +performance of different apps and games. You can read all the juicy +details here.

She also worked on introducing CPU jobs to the Broadcom GPU kernel +driver in Linux. These changes allow user space to implement jobs that +get executed on the CPU in sync with the work on the GPU. She wrote a +great blog post detailing what CPU jobs allow you to do and how they +work that you can read here.

Christian Gmeiner on the Graphics team has also been working on +adding Perfetto support to Broadcom GPUs. Perfetto is a performance +tracing tool and support for it in Broadcom drivers will allow to +developers to gain more insight into bottlenecks of their GPU +applications. You can check out his changes to add support in the +following MRs: - MR +31575 - MR +32277 - MR +31751

The Raspberry Pi team here at Igalia presented all of their work at +XDC 2024 in Montréal. You can see a video below.

Linux Kernel 6.8

A number of Igalians made several contributions to the Linux 6.8 +kernel release back in March of this year. Our colleague Maíra wrote a +great blog post outlining these contributions that you can read here. +To highlight some of these contributions:

AMD HDR & Color Management +
- Melissa Wen has been working on improving and implementing HDR +support in AMD’s display driver as well as working on color management +in the Linux display stack.
Async Flip +
- André Almeida implemented support for asynchronous page flip in the +atomic DRM modesetting API.
V3D 7.1.x Kernel Driver +
- Iago Toral contributed a number of patches upstream to get the +Broadcom DRM driver working with the latest Broadcom hardware used in +the Raspberry Pi 5.
GPU stats for the Raspberry Pi 4/5 +
- José María “Chema” Casanova worked on adding GPU stats support to +the latest Raspberry Pi hardware.

Turnip Improvements

Dhruv Mark Collins has been very hard at work to try and bring +performance parity between Qualcomm’s proprietary driver and the open +source Turnip driver. Two of his big contributions to this were +improving the 2D buffer to image copies on A7XX devices, and +implementing unidirectional Low Resolution Z (LRZ) on A7XX devices. You +can see the MR for these changes here +and here.

A new member of the Igalia Graphics Team Karmjit Mahil has been +working on different parts of the Turnip stack, but one notable +improvement he made was to improve fmulz handling for +Direct3D 9. You can check out his changes here +and read more about them.

Danylo Piliaiev has been hard at work adding support for the latest +generation of Adreno GPUs. This included getting support for the A750 +working, and then implementing performance improvements to bring it +up to parity with other Adreno GPUs in Turnip. He also worked on +implementing a number of Vulkan extensions and performance improvements +such as:

VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64 +
- MR +27776
VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate +
- MR +30905
VK_KHR_8bit_storage +
- MR +28254
shaderInt8 feature +
- MR +29875
VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_rotate +
- MR +31358
VK_EXT_map_memory_placed +
- MR +28928
VK_EXT_legacy_dithering +
- MR +30536
VK_EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one +
- MR +29387

Display Next Hackfest +& Display/KMS Meet-up

Igalia hosted the 2024 version of the Display Next Hackfest. This +community event is a way to get Linux display developers together to +work on improving the Linux display stack. Our Melissa Wen wrote a blog +post about the event and what it was like to organize it. You can read +all about it here.

Just in-case you thought you couldn’t get enough Linux display stack, +Melissa also helped organize a Display/KMS meet-up at XDC 2024. She +wrote all about that meet-up and the progress the community made on her +blog here.

AMD Display & AMDGPU

Melissa Wen has also been hard at work improving AMDGPU’s display +driver. She made a number of changes including improving +display debug log to include hardware color capabilities, Migrating +EDID handling to EDID common code and various bug fixes such as:

Fixing null-pointer dereference on edid reading +
- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240216122401.216860-1-mwen@igalia.com/
Checking dc_link before dereferencing +
- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240227190828.444715-1-mwen@igalia.com/
Using mpcc_count to log MPC state +
- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240412163928.118203-1-mwen@igalia.com/
Fixing cursor offset on rotation 180 +
- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240807075546.831208-22-chiahsuan.chung@amd.com/
Fixes for kernel crashes since cursor overlay mode +
- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20241217205029.39850-1-mwen@igalia.com/

Tvrtko Ursulin, a recent addition to our team, has been working on +fixing issues in AMDGPU and some of the Linux kernel’s common code. For +example, he worked on fixing bugs in the DRM scheduler around missing +locks, optimizing the re-lock cycle on the submit path, and cleaned up +the code. On AMDGPU he worked on improving memory usage reporting, +fixing out of bounds writes, and micro-optimized ring emissions. For DMA +fence he simplified fence merging and resolved a potential memory leak. +Lastly, on workqueue he fixed false positive sanity check warnings that +AMDGPU & DRM scheduler interactions were triggering. You can see the +code for some of changes below: - https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240906180639.12218-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ +- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20241008150532.23661-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ +- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20241227111938.22974-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ +- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240813135712.82611-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ +- https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240712152855.45284-1-tursulin@igalia.com/

Vulkan & OpenGL Extensions

GL_EXT_texture_offset_non_const +
- Ricardo was busy working on extending OpenGL by adding this +extension to GLSL as well as providing an implementation for it in glslang
VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 & +VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 +
- Igalia is listed as a contributor to these extensions and worked +very hard to implement CTS support for the extensions.

Etnaviv Improvements

Christian Gmeiner, one of the maintainers of the Etnaviv driver for +Vivante GPUs, has been hard at work this year to make a number of big +improvements to Etnaviv. This includes using hwdb to detect GPU +features, which he wrote about here. Another +big improvement was migrating Etnaviv to use isaspec for the GPU isa +description, allowing an assembler and disassembler to be generated from +XML. This also allowed Etnaviv to reuse some common features in Mesa for +assemblers/disassemblers and take advantage of the python code +generation features others in the community have been working on. He +wrote a detailed blog about it, that you can find here. +On the same vein of Etnaviv infrastructure improvements, Christian has +also been working on a new shader compiler, written in Rust, called +“EBC”. Christian presented this new shader compiler at XDC 2024 this +year. You can check out his presentation below.

On the side of new features, Christian landed a big one in Mesa 24.03 +for Etnaviv: Multiple Render Target (MRT) support! This allows games and +applications to render to multiple render targets (think framebuffers) +in a single graphics operations. This feature is heavily used by +deferred rendering techniques, and is a requirement for later versions +of desktop OpenGL and OpenGL ES 3. Keep an eye on Christian’s blog to see any +of his future announcements.

Lavapipe/LLVMpipe, Android +& ChromeOS

I had a busy year working on improving Lavapipe/LLVMpipe platform +integration. This started with adding support for DMABUF import/export, +so that the display handles from Android Window system could be properly +imported and mapped. Next came Android window system integration for DRI +software rendering backend in EGL, and lastly but most importantly came +updating the documentation in Mesa for building Android support. I wrote +all about this effort here.

The latter half on the year had me working on improving lavapipe’s +integration with ChromeOs, and having Lavapipe work as a host Vulkan +driver for Venus. You can see some of the changes I made in +virglrenderer here +and crosvm here. +This work is still ongoing.

What’s Next?

We’re not planning to stop our 2024 momentum, and we’re hopping for +2025 to be a great year for Igalia and the Linux graphics stack! I’m +booked to present about Lavapipe at +Vulkanised 2025, where Ricardo will also present about +Device-Generated Commands. Maíra & Chema will be presenting together +at FOSDEM 2025 about improving performance on Raspberry Pi GPUs, and +Melissa will also present about kworkflow there. We’ll also be at XDC +2025, networking and presenting about all the work we are doing on the +Linux graphics stack. Thanks for following our work this year, and +here’s to making 2025 an even better year for Linux graphics!

2024 Graphics Team Contributions at +Igalia