Panfrost Open-Source Mali Driver Now Has A Winsys Working With ARM's Kernel Driver

Open-source driver developer Tomeu Vizoso of Collabora has taken to some Panfrost driver work for greatly enhancing the viability of this open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver.

Replacing the hacky X11 SHM buffer implementation used to get the Gallium3D driver's rendering presented, there is now a preliminary Winsys that works atop ARM's official kernel driver.

Vizoso noted, "By properly creating, exporting and importing buffers, we can now run applications on GBM, from demos such as kmscube and glmark2 to compositors such as Weston, but also big applications such as Kodi. We are also supporting zero-copy display of GPU-rendered clients in Weston."

Previously the Panfrost driver wouldn't even work with Wayland and the shared memory buffer hack greatly hindered the performance.

While this Winsys allows the ARM kernel driver to work with Panfrost, ultimately their goal is to provide a proper open-source DRM kernel driver in parallel to the Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL code in user-space. More details on this latest open-source community driver accomplishment via Vizoso's blog.