Vulkan driver merges with Mesa for the Raspberry Pi 4
Raspberry Pi 4: Higher-quality, faster graphics edge closer with Vulkan support via Mesa
Vulkan V3DV graphics are now part of the latest Mesa graphic stack for Raspberry Pi 4’s Broadcom VideoCore GPU.
Raspberry Pi 4 owners will be pleased to know that Vulkan support is one step closer thanks to the Vulkan driver, V3DV, being merged in the latest version of the Mesa graphic stack for the Raspberry Pi 4.
Liam Tung
As noted by Linux news site Phoronix, the VD3V driver has been under development for the past year to bring Vulkan support to newer Broadcom VideoCore GPU hardware, especially the Raspberry Pi 4. The VD3V driver has now mainlined in an upcoming version of Mesa, the open-source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation contracted consulting firm Igalia to develop the VD3V Vulkan driver and announced upcoming Vulkan support for the Raspberry 4 at the beginning of the year.
The VD3V Vulkan driver promises higher-quality and faster graphics for the single-board computer, extending Vulkan support from already Android phones to the Raspberry Pi 4. However, at that stage the effort had only managed to get a Raspberry Pi to render an RGB triangle, but it was nonetheless a milestone.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Raspberry Pi Foundation co-founder Ebert Upton said at the time.
On Tuesday, Igalia’s Iago Toral, who’s been working on the Mesa graphics driver stack for Raspberry Pi 4, announced that the driver has been merged with Mesa upstream, making it one of the official Vulkan Mesa drivers along with drivers for other graphics hardware.
This move means VD3V will be part of all Mesa releases, and anyone who wants to test it can get it from the official Mesa repository.
Toral added that the VD3V driver has now passed over 100,000 tests from the Khronos Conformance Test Suite for Vulkan 1.0 and has implemented the full Vulkan 1.0 API.
However, he pointed out that more work needs to be done.
“Although the CTS is a really complete test suite, it is not the same as a real use case. As mentioned in some of our updates, we have been testing the driver with Vulkan ports of the original Quake trilogy, but deeper and more detailed testing is needed,” notes Toral.
After this has taken place, Toral plans to test the driver further and iron out bugs and performance issues.
As noted by Phoronix, Mesa 20.3, the latest version of Mesa, is scheduled to be released as stable in early December and because it is part of Mesa, it’s easier for Raspberry Pi Linux distributions to offer this Broadcom Vulkan driver.
