Qualcomm Posts Open-Source GPU Driver Patches For Adreno 850 One Day After Announcement

Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 as quite an interesting mobile SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 features Adreno 850 graphics and already one-day later their engineers are out with initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A850 with the MSM kernel driver.

Hitting the mailing list this morning are patches for the Adreno 850 GPU found with the Hawi SoC, which now is presumed to be the newly-announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. For other areas of the Linux kernel there have been Qualcomm Hawi patches coming about the past several months.

In addition, today's patches also bring up support for the Adreno 845 "Maili" GPU. The Adreno 845 is quite similar to the Adreno 850 but lacking the MALU Matrix core.

Today's patch series explains:

"Adreno 850 is the next generation of A8x GPU present in Hawi SoC. It shares the ADRENO_8XX_GEN2 family and slice architecture with A840, but has many architectural improvements. There is a new block Matrix core (MALU) which helps to accelerate certain compute workloads. Also, there is a new Bx rail that powes a part of the GPU IP. GMU is now powered by a dedicated GDSC powered by MxG rail.

Maili GPU (Adreno 845) is very similar to A850, except that it doesn't have the MALU block.

We will post the Mesa support and linux-firmware support soon. MALU support will be brought in separately along with its support in Mesa.

As there is no display support available for Hawi/Maili, validated offscreen testcases that render basic triangles, glmark2-offscreen etc."

Great to see the Mesa driver support for the Adreno 845 and Adreno 850 should also be out soon. Also exciting that the MALU matrix core will be enabled in Mesa.