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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