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Linux Hardware and Graphics: Vivante GPUs ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme
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Christian Gmeiner: Fixing the R/B swap the right way
If you’ve ever looked at a GPU render and seen blue where red should be, you’ve met the R/B swap problem. For etnaviv this has been a long-standing source of complexity. We were solving it in the shader, but the proprietary blob driver had a simpler approach all along. As part of my work at Igalia, I finally sat down and did it properly.
Vivante GPUs have a quirk: the Pixel Engine (PE) always writes pixels in BGRA byte order. When your API says “render to R8G8B8A8_UNORM”, what actually lands in memory is B, G, R, A. Every byte of every pixel, every frame. The hardware just works that way.
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ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme: Linux gets access to more sensors
The Linux driver asus-ec-sensors is to be extended with support for the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme. The submitted v2 patch adds the documentation and the actual hwmon driver, totaling 16 new lines of code. That sounds minor, but it is quite relevant for users of such boards under Linux, because this is not about RGB folklore, but about usable sensor data for temperature and water-cooling monitoring. The patch adds the board to the list of supported models and, in the Intel 700-family path, adds additional sensors for water flow as well as water inlet and outlet temperatures.