Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Gets Mali T600/T700 Midgard Update

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Gets Mali T600/T700 Midgard Update

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that was recently merged into Mesa 19.1 will soon have better support for the Mali T600/T700 series graphics...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Gallium-Update-For-Mid

[oiaohm]

This mali graphics driver issues is one of the biggest barriers to making a universal boot disc for arm. If you can get up even basic graphics with basic input you then can asked users questions about the platform and have users install extra drivers. Now if you cannot get the graphic output up you are in big trouble for installer.

Closed source arm mali drivers don't support all versions of Mali. The latest versions of closed source Mali are android or wayland no X11 support.

Even if Panfrost can only get basic 2d rendering up on the older cards this will be enough to display installer interface to select the graphics drivers and worst what kernel to reboot to.

[stikonas]

This mali graphics driver issues is one of the biggest barriers to making a universal boot disc for arm. If you can get up even basic graphics with basic input you then can asked users questions about the platform and have users install extra drivers. Now if you cannot get the graphic output up you are in big trouble for installer.

Closed source arm mali drivers don't support all versions of Mali. The latest versions of closed source Mali are android or wayland no X11 support.

Even if Panfrost can only get basic 2d rendering up on the older cards this will be enough to display installer interface to select the graphics drivers and worst what kernel to reboot to.

Panfrost would help with your problem. Kernel driver that brings up display is unrelated to Panfrost. For example on my board I need to enable CONFIG_DRM_ROCKCHIP=y for that. Then display boots up and everything runs in software rendering mode. It is slow but usable if you need to install something.

Also, modern graphics stack doesn't use separate 2d rendering acceleration, it uses 3d rendering to draw 2d primitives.