Panfrost: Open Source meets Arm Mali GPUs
summary
An open-source Mesa driver called Panfrost implements Midgard (Mali‑T, T700/T800) and initial Bifrost support after reverse engineering starting in 2017; kernel and Mesa pieces land in mainline in 2019. Development uses a shader loader that initially fed binaries from the ARM proprietary compiler, then an ISA/compiler reimplementation (Connor Abbott et al.), and CI plus libdrm/DRM kernel glue. Hardware-tested on RK3288/T860 running Wayland with OpenGL ES 2.0 working, OpenGL ES 3.x in progress, Vulkan not yet.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to the speaker
- 1:36Overview of ARM GPUs
- 3:58High-end and current GPUs
- 6:08The Valhalla architecture
- 7:07The need for open drivers
- 8:55Reverse engineering efforts
- 11:10Developing the Panfrost driver
- 12:43Current state of Panfrost
- 15:45Graphics driver architecture
- 19:13Gallium framework and Mesa
- 21:43Compiler infrastructure
- 25:52Contributions and CI
