Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver 'v3dv' continues advancing, watch the talk at FOSDEM 21

Interested in keeping up with the Vulkan driver development on the Raspberry Pi 4? We have a new update for you and an upcoming event you might want to watch.

While the v3dv driver is now part of Mesa and was released along with Mesa 20.3.0 back in December 2020, work has not stopped on it. There was still plenty of areas it could improve upon from features to performance, with developer Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias writing on their blog about recent work.

Some of what's new includes:

• The following optional 1.0 features were enabled: logicOp, althaToOne, independentBlend, drawIndirectFirstInstance, and shaderStorageImageExtendedFormats.
• Added support for timestamp queries.
• Added implementation for VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_EXT_private_data, and VK_KHR_display extensions
• Added support for Wayland WSI.

Interestingly it seems more developers are getting involved, as multiple features were hooked up by people not involved in the "core" team of the driver. Now it's in Mesa directly, anyone can get involved.

The driver itself became a conformant Vulkan driver last year but they still had more testing to do to find bugs. As part of this the Order Independent Transparency demo from Sascha Willems is now working too (see Willem's Vulkan stuff here):

Additionally the FOSDEM 21 event in this weekend and they will be doing a talk on Saturday February 6  at 3PM UTC. The talk will cover the development story and current status of the driver, along with an overview of the design and the challenges of doing it.