Panfrost Gallium3D To Focus On Better Performance, OpenGL 3.1 Support

With Mesa 20.3 that should be released as stable in December there is working Arm Bifrost graphics support for the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D while looking past that this Arm Mali driver is going to be focusing on better performance and desktop OpenGL 3.1 support.

The Mesa Gallium3D Panfrost code has been working on support for newer Arm Mali "Bifrost" graphics support to complement the driver's Midgard support. There's also been continued Panfrost DRM kernel driver work too.

With Mesa 20.3 coming in a few weeks there is Bifrost support working out-of-the-box following all of the work done in recent months. For those on Midgard, there is also better performance in store thanks to Arm Frame-Buffer Compression being enabled. These latest improvements follow Arm now contributing resources to the Panfrost effort.

Bifrost spans from the Mali G31 through G71 as the first-gen parts. the Mali G52/G72 are Bifrost 2nd Gen, and Mali G72 as Bifrost 3rd Gen. No word yet on when we can expect Panfrost support for the latest-generation Mali "Valhall" GPUs.

Looking past Mesa 20.3, lead Panfrost developer Alyssa Rosenzweig notes they will be focusing on better driver performance as well as tackling OpenGL 3.1 support.