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.

ARM's Mali Midgard T600/T700 generations have always been part of the support target for the Panfrost driver, but the newer T860 is where the developers spend most of their reverse-engineering, open-source driver development resources. With a several hundred line patch, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is receiving updated support for the older Mali Midgard hardware with tests done on the T760 while not regressing the newer T860 support.

Between these generations there are different magic values for those numbers yet to be deciphered by the reverse-engineering, community crew. There is also errata differences, CPU bitness differences, and other alterations between these Mali generations.

The updated T600/T700 series support will presumably soon be part of Mesa 19.1, but for now the patch is on the mailing list should you be interested in testing out this Gallium3D driver on the Midgard hardware.

While Panfrost was recently merged to Mesa, it doesn't yet have mainline Linux kernel driver support on the DRM side and there are also other missing Panfrost bits until the driver infrastructure is settled.