Collabora has been working on the Panthor open-source GPU kernel driver for the third-generation Arm Valhall GPU (Arm Mali-G310, Mali-G510, Mali-G610, and Mali-G710) for around two years, and the code has just been merged in drm-misc meaning it should be part of the upcoming Linux 6.10 release sometime in July 2024.
Many regular readers must already be familiar with the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali GPUs as we’ve covered its development progress over the years. Panthor is a new kernel driver specific to the 3rd gen Valhall GPUs that still relies on the Panfrost driver residing in userspace, as explained by Boris Brezillon from Collabora. Furthermore, the existing Gallium “Panfrost” driver in Mesa has also received a merge request adding support for those GPUs (10th gen Arm Mali = 3rd gen Arm Mali Valhall) meaning popular targets such as the Rockchip RK3588 SoC with an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU will soon have 100% open-source graphics support in Linux.
The announcement on the Collobora website provides a few more details about the involvement of various persons and organizations in the project, including Arm which recently claimed: “Panfrost is now the GPU driver for the Linux community“. For the Panthor project specifically, Arm not only provided documentation about the GPU but also technical support with two Arm engineers assigned as co-maintainers of the kernel driver.
The current Panthor driver supports OpenGL ES, but work in the Vulkan API has also started and we may get a release by the end of the year. Besides the driver itself, Collabora will also work on tools for the 3rd gen Valhall GPUs such as performance counters, support for devcoredump, and command stream tracing. Deeper technical details about the implementation of the Panthor driver can be found in an earlier post on Collabora with information about the new Command Stream Frontend and the new uAPI.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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On this topic, Vulkan support for Midgard (RK3399) has recently been removed from PanVK.
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=c0d65398279db02f68b5acc23c3afbf1c34a5204
I haven’t clicked on the link but is there a TLDR reason for why it was removed?
You should click the link. The commit message is quite informative.
[ While rk3588 is market dominant for A76 and Valhall gpu and being a versatile option compared to these days x64 hardware (depending on preferences and utilization profile) it seems appropriate asking what’s arm64/risc-V ‘s progress towards Meteor Lake or Ryzen’s 3/5 platforms (if it’s about performance and external connectors USB4&Thunderbolt on GB/s measure for quite some money, there’s Apple’s M1-M3)?
SBCs aren’t famous for highest cost, AFAIR, but more likely longevity (at least hardware related), understandable, but hopefully not standard procedure for non-current hw.
(While ~current (Bifrost 3rd gen, Valhall 4th gen, 5th gen?) hw is only supported with suitable kernel for
‘https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/mali-drivers/user-space ‘(?) )
humorous addition(?): °™open source or is it °open source™ (maybe it has an international implication me not expecting, but that looks opposing)
(‘ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/09/18/arm-officially-supports-panfrost-open-source-mali-gpu-driver-development/ ‘) ]
Just read the first buncho lines and well I guess it’s no shipwreck. It’s just Vulcan no signs of dropping opengl anytime soon. Maybe sad it’s dropped, but so far I (as a normal non gaming non power user) never missed Vulcan on my lower end pcs/boards.
Who would have expected arm paid co-maintainers when arm was actively sabotaging the original lima efforts, incl. direct attacks on the dev…
Times they are a’ changin’.
Didn’t know that – what did they do to the poor dev? Did they take a Nintendon’t approach?
Glad to see that, as willmore puts it, the times they are indeed a’ changin’
I’m no more sure, but I guess he lost access to all ARM developer resources, etc. quite a pita when you do that for a living. But well take it with a grain of salt, it’s a long time since I read up on such news.
Thank god the times have changed and open source is steadily soaring towards world domination harr harr harr…
I hope that we don’t have to wait until July to see some devs adding the code to existing test builds of a variety of Linux based distros.
Libreelec may be one place to keep an eye on as they wisely kept away from the RK3588 until they saw actual evidence of upstreaming, which one of their devs chewitt commented recently “Rockchip seem to be taking upstreaming more seriously again”.
When they and Ambian jump on board with test release then we may see some real progress towards getting the best from this SOC that has been veering more towards lemon status.
I shall keep scepticism very much alive for the time being though.
It should have never have been this long to get to this point and Rockchip/ARM are at the top of the complaints list for this.
Interesting because Collabora has quite a neat table showing mainline status for the RK3588’s different hw features… https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md
Interesting snippet from Collabora’s blog:
“Angelo also discovered that Panfrost did not support basic power management on all SoCs, including MediaTek, and all Mali GPUs. Following power consumption and performance analyses on various Chromebooks, he engineered a complete power-saving solution that works on both MediaTek and other vendors’ SoCs embedding any Mali GPU. This allowed the GPU to internally turn off Shaders, Tilers, and the L2 cache during Runtime, and to cut power completely during full system sleep, reducing its power consumption greatly in both cases.”