Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Continues Speeding Ahead For Open-Source Mali Graphics

Panfrost only made its initial debut as part of the recent Mesa 19.1 release for providing open-source Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard graphics driver support on Linux independent of Arm and their official binary driver. While the resources are limited, so far Panfrost is making stellar progress.

Panfrost continues making terrific progress for providing open-source Arm Mali graphics support. In part, this is made by possible by lead developer Alyssa Rosenzweig currently interning for the summer at Collabora where she appears to be primarily working on this currently OpenGL ES 2.0 class driver and continuing to strive for competitive performance with Arm's official Linux GLES driver.

Some recent achievements just in the past few days to Panfrost for Mesa 19.2 include sRGB texturing, tiled rendering support, job submission handling, auto-vectorization for Midgard, better resource management, viewport robustness work, handling of more hardware instructions, disassembly improvements, and other features.

It's a wild ride for Panfrost with more than 50 commits just over the past day. Details for those interested in all the intricacies can find them via Mesa Git. It will be interesting to see where Panfrost ends up by the end of summer for Mesa 19.2 and moving forward if it can prove to rival Arm's binary drivers, similar to how MSM+Freedreno has really taken on Qualcomm's Adreno graphics driver stack and on the desktop side over the years how the open-source AMD Mesa code took on the Catalyst / Radeon Software components.