Panfrost

The Panfrost driver stack includes an OpenGL ES implementation for Arm Mali GPUs based on the Midgard and Bifrost microarchitectures. It is conformant on Mali-G52, Mali-G57 and Mali-G610, but non-conformant on other GPUs. The following hardware is currently supported:

Models

Architecture

OpenGL ES

OpenGL

T600, T620, T720

Midgard (v4)

2.0

2.1

T760, T820, T830 T860, T880

Midgard (v5)

3.1

3.1

G72

Bifrost (v6)

3.1

3.1

G31, G51, G52, G76

Bifrost (v7)

3.1

3.1

G57

Valhall (v9)

3.1

3.1

G310, G610

Valhall (v10)

3.1

3.1

Other Midgard and Bifrost chips (e.g. G71) are not yet supported.

Older Mali chips based on the Utgard architecture (Mali-400, Mali-450) are supported in the Lima driver, not Panfrost. Lima is also available in Mesa.

Other graphics APIs (Vulkan, OpenCL) are not supported at this time.

Building

Panfrost’s OpenGL support is a Gallium driver. Since Mali GPUs are 3D-only and do not include a display controller, Mesa uses kmsro to support display controllers paired with Mali GPUs. If your board with a Panfrost supported GPU has a display controller with mainline Linux support not supported by kmsro, it’s easy to add support, see the commit cff7de4bb597e9 as an example.

LLVM is not required by Panfrost’s compilers. LLVM support in Mesa can safely be disabled for most OpenGL ES users with Panfrost.

Build like meson . build/ -Dvulkan-drivers= -Dgallium-drivers=panfrost -Dllvm=disabled for a build directory build.

For general information on building Mesa, read the install documentation.

Chat

Panfrost developers and users hang out on IRC at #panfrost on OFTC. Note that registering and authenticating with NickServ is required to prevent spam. Join the chat.

Technical details

You can read more technical details about Panfrost here: