Panfrost Project Getting "Half-Way Driver" To Gallium3D

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream.

It's believed they understand the command stream fully for OpenGL ES 2.0 now for ARM's Midgard hardware with the exceptions of textures, frame-buffer objects, and advanced blend modes. Sure, those are important features, but they want to get moving now in ensuring they are on the right track with their understanding.

Obviously their end-game for Panfrost is to have an in-tree Mesa driver based upon Gallium3D for the Mali GPUs, but with Mesa/Gallium3D being an ever-moving target and also taking a while to build all that code when using low-power ARM boards, they are pursuing a "half-way" driver.

This is a stepping stone from their current replaying-of-traces code on the step towards a real, actual OpenGL ES driver within Mesa. This half-way driver will follow Gallium3D coding conventions, make use of G3D headers, etc. After that is all proven and squared away, the code should ease the path into having a fully-working Gallium3D driver.

Planning details on this Panfrost Half-Way driver via this blog post by Alyssa.