Gallium3D Panfrost Driver Can Now Handle Running The GNOME Shell Desktop

Considering how resource intensive modern Linux desktops are particularly on OpenGL for compositing, it's quite an achievement that the Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard hardware can now run the GNOME Shell.

Alyssa Rosenzweig interning for Collabora had a summer goal, among others, of getting Panfrost working with GNOME. Well, not even to July, that goal has been realized in the latest Git development code.

Getting GNOME to run well on Panfrost required robustness and performance work, tuning around the tiled architecture of Mali, and other bits.

Panfrost hasn't yet achieved OpenGL ES 2.0 conformance, but it's working on that and more. Panfrost is looking like it should be in good shape for Mesa 19.2 due out in August after just being merged for this quarter's Mesa 19.1 release.

More details on Panfrost running with GNOME can be found on the Collabora blog.