Lucas is a developer working on cool things
For the last year I’ve been living in the small city of Puerto de la Cruz (PDLC) in Tenerife. PDLC is an interesting place for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that fact that it’s not very big. The city has a population of ~30k people in an area of 8.73 km² according to wikipedia . Because of this, its really not that hard to walk around the city, as long as you avoid walking in…
2024 has been an exciting year for the Igalia’s Graphics Team . We’ve been making a lot of progress on Turnip, AMD display driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics stack, Vulkan video, and more. Vulkan Device Generated Commands Igalia’s Ricardo Garcia has been working hard on adding support for the new VK_EXT_device_generated_commands extension in the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite. He wrote an excellent…
My current project at Igalia has had me working on Mesa’s software renderers, llvmpipe and lavapipe. I’ve been working to get them running on Android, and I wanted to document the progress I’ve made, the challenges I’ve faced, and talk a little bit about the development process for a project like this. My work is not totally merged into upstream mesa yet, but you can see the MRs I made here:…
Vulkanised sign at google’s office Last week I had an exciting opportunity to attend the Vulkanised 2024 conference. For those of you not familar with the event, it is “The Premier Vulkan Developer Conference” hosted by the Vulkan working group from Khronos. With the excitement out of the way, I decided to write about some of the interesting information that came out of the conference. A Few…
Recently I’ve been working on a project where I needed to convert an application written in OpenGL to a software renderer. The matrix transformation code in OpenGL made use of the GLM library for matrix math, and I needed to convert the 4x4 matrices to be 3x3 matrices to work with the software renderer. There was some existing code to do this that was broken, and looked something like this:…
It’s an exciting time for Mesa as its next major release is unveiled this week. Igalia has played an important role in this milestone, with Eric Engestrom managing the release and 11 other Igalians contributing over 110 merge requests. A sample of these contributions are detailed below. radv: Implement vk.check_status As part of an effort to enhance the reliability of GPU resets on amdgpu, Tony…
Android running Freedreno As part of my training at Igalia I’ve been attempting to write a new backend for Freedreno that targets the proprietary “KGSL” kernel mode driver. For those unaware there are two “main” kernel mode drivers on Qualcomm SOCs for the GPU, there is the “MSM”, and “KGSL”. “MSM” is DRM compliant, and Freedreno already able to run on this driver. “KGSL” is the proprietary KMD…
At the beginning of this month I participated in the Games Institutes’s Global Game Jam event. The Games Institute is an organization at my local university (The University of Waterloo) that focuses on games-based research. They host a game jam every school term and this term’s jam happened to coincide with the Global Game Jam. Since this event was open to everyone (and it’s been a few years since…
This year I started a new job working with Igalia’s Graphics Team . For those of you who don’t know Igalia they are a “worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software” . As a new member of the team, I thought it would be a great idea to summarize the incredible amount of work the team completed in 2022. If you’re interested keep reading! Vulkan 1.2…
After reading Maggie Appleton page on digital gardens I was inspired to convert my own website into a digital garden. I have many half baked ideas that I seem to be able to finish. Some of them get to a published state like and , but many of them never make it to the published state. The idea of digital garden seems very appealing to me, as it encourages you to post on a topic even if you haven’t…
After re-watching suckerpinch’s “Reverse Emulation” video I got inspired to try and replicate what he did, but instead do it on an N64. Now my idea here is not to preform reverse emulation on the N64 itself but instead to use the SBC as a cheap way to make a dev focused flash cart. Seeing that sukerpinch was able to meet the timings of the NES bus made me think it might be possible to meet the N64…
Lately I’ve been trying to implement a software renderer following the algorithm described by Juan Pineda in “A Parallel Algorithm for Polygon Rasterization” . For those unfamiliar with the paper, it describes an algorithm to rasterize triangles that has an extremely nice quality, that you simply need to preform a few additions per pixel to see if the next pixel is inside the triangle. It achieves…
So this year, myself and two others decided to participate together in the N64Brew homebrew GameJam, where we were supposed to build a homebrew game that would run on a real Nintendo 64. The game jam took place from October 8th until December 8th and was the second GameJam in N64Brew history. Unfortunately, we never ended up finishing the game, but we did build a really cool tech demo. Our project…
One thing I’m very interested in is computer graphics. This could be complex 3D graphics or simple 2D graphics. The idea of getting a computer to display visual data fascinates me. One fundamental part of showing visual data is interfacing with a computer monitor. This can be accomplished by generating a video signal that the monitor understands. Below I have written instructions on how an FPGA…