Last week I got review on the new interface for tiling for vc4, and landed it in the kernel. I’ve submitted Mesa patches to the list, landed the kernel backport in Raspbian, and have sent Simon (the package maintainer at the Foundation) the Mesa patchset to backport all of my work from the last 6 months (unfortunately Raspbian generally doesn’t update Mesa past the Debian stable release, so graphics work for them has long delays). I also worked with Dom at the Foundation to get an interface for the firmwarekms mode to do tiled scanout, so it will be as fast as the open source driver.

I also reworked the official 7” touchscreen panel driver again. I had initially written it as a DSI panel driver, then got told it should be a bridge driver plus a panel driver, then the bridge maintainers told me it should be only one panel driver but attach to I2C. Maybe this version will stick, who knows.

My Mesa side for pl111 is now in master, so I’ve got the second platform for the vc4 driver basically done. I can’t wait to do another one.

I got a question about whether VC4 could do EGL_ANDROID_native_fence, to allow using Android’s hwcomposer (the display server that puts surfaces in KMS planes if it can). I spent a while looking into it, and found that while code had landed in Mesa for other drivers, the piglit tests had been left around untouched for the last half a year. I reviewed them and hopefully they can land soon. Unfortunately, they don’t cover the important functionality of the extension, so I can’t use them to actually write the driver code (which doesn’t look very hard) until I build some more tests.

On the non-vc4 kernel side, I prepared and submitted pull requests for 4.13. We’ve got USB OTG support for the Pi Zero, SDHOST enabled by default finally, thermal enabled by default finally, and the RPi3 DT being installed for 32-bit kernels. Three of these took months longer than they should have, because the Linux kernel has the worst software development process I’ve worked with since XFree86.