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 but non-conformant on other GPUs. The following hardware is currently supported:
Product |
Architecture |
OpenGL ES |
OpenGL |
|---|---|---|---|
Mali T720 |
Midgard (v4) |
2.0 |
2.1 |
Mali T760 |
Midgard (v5) |
3.1 |
3.1 |
Mali T820 |
Midgard (v5) |
3.1 |
3.1 |
Mali T860 |
Midgard (v5) |
3.1 |
3.1 |
Mali G72 |
Bifrost (v6) |
3.1 |
3.1 |
Mali G31 |
Bifrost (v7) |
3.1 |
3.1 |
Mali G52 |
Bifrost (v7) |
3.1 |
3.1 |
Other Midgard and Bifrost chips (T604, T620, T830, T880, G71, G51, G76) may
work but may be buggy. End users are advised against using Panfrost on
unsupported hardware. Developers interested in porting will need to allowlist
the hardware (src/gallium/drivers/panfrost/pan_screen.c).
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/ -Ddri-drivers= -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.