This tedious process is at the heart of any free graphics driver project, but with patience, it is effective. The basic parts of the command stream have been known since the early days of the project, but in the past weeks, I methodically went through the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification searching for new features, writing test code to iterate the permutations, discovering how the feature is encoded in the command stream, and writing a decoder for it. A shader compiler is only useful if there’s a way to run the shaders, after all! In the two weeks since then, I’ve shifted my attention from shaders back to the command stream, the fixed-function part of the pipeline. In the last update of the free software Panfrost driver, I unveiled the Midgard shader compiler. Rosenzweig – The Half Way Driver The Half Way Driver
