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The Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU powers the graphics subsystem and offers the following capabilities:
  • Serves as a three-dimensional (3D) graphics accelerator with 64‑bit addressing.
  • Incorporates the graphics memory (GMEM) as a dedicated memory for the graphics subsystem and facilitates Fast Z, color, and stencil rendering.
  • Supports Qualcomm® Universal Bandwidth Compression, enhancing the overall performance.
The Adreno GPU supports the following graphics and compute APIs: Note See Hardware SoCs supported on Qualcomm® Linux®.

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Graphics subsystem architecture

The graphics architecture consists of Qualcomm and open-source components, as shown in the following figure.
Figure: Graphics subsystem architecture

Figure: Graphics subsystem architecture

In the preceding figure, the Adreno GPU driver renders graphics using the following process and open-source components:
  1. Wayland client application initiates rendering through EGL/OpenGL ES.
  2. Wayland protocol sets the registry and callbacks for rendering.
  3. Graphics buffer management gets the Wayland backbuffer for rendering.
  4. Adreno GPU driver submits the rendering commands to Kernel Graphics Support Layer (KGSL) using swapbuffer, glflush, or glfinish with OpenGL.
  5. Weston compositor sends the rendered surfaces for composition to Adreno GPU driver.
  6. Acquires a GBM surface for composing the rendered frame.
  7. Adreno GPU driver submits the rendered frame.
  8. Weston compositor sends the final composed buffer to display through DRM.
  9. DRM submits the buffer at the back-end to the display kernel driver to show on the screen.
Adreno GPU driver The Qualcomm Adreno GPU driver is a collection of user-mode precompiled libraries. The Adreno GPU driver can’t be modified and must be used as-is. Adreno GPU firmware The following table lists the firmware files of the Adreno GPU hardware.
Kernel Graphics Support Layer (KGSL) KGSL serves as the kernel-mode driver for the Adreno GPU. The primary function of the KGSL driver is to submit commands generated by the Adreno user-mode driver to the Adreno GPU for processing. Additionally, the KGSL driver communicates with the GMU to ensure proper state management. The following tables list the supported GPU libraries and KGSL driver information. Note The GPU libraries table is applicable only to overlay or qcom‑multimedia‑proprietary‑image. Table: GPU libraries Table: KGSL driver

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