Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Seeing New "BIR" Compiler

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Seeing New "BIR" Compiler

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali Gallium3D driver is seeing work on a new driver-specific IR and compiler back-end...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-New-BIR-Compiler

[kmare]

Really glad seeing the development for Mali moving forward! Thank you to all the developers involved!
Could anyone suggest a development board with such a chip running properly (and perhaps a distro for it) without much hassle?

[miskol]

Really glad seeing the development for Mali moving forward! Thank you to all the developers involved!
Could anyone suggest a development board with such a chip running properly (and perhaps a distro for it) without much hassle?

Look here armbian.com

[polarathene]

Could anyone suggest a development board with such a chip running properly (and perhaps a distro for it) without much hassle?

ODroid N2 uses Panfrost IIRC, but I'm not sure what the status is hassle wise. Whatever they supply you to run on it officially should be fine I think, just might be a bit outdated as there is still efforts to get mainline kernel support last I knew. There was some issues with USB host controller quality, I am not sure but I think that's been ironed out by now.

[archsway]

ODroid N2 uses Panfrost IIRC, but I'm not sure what the status is hassle wise.

Unless you want to help out with development, there isn't really much point in getting a Bifrost board yet.

At the moment, you'll get the best support from RK3288 or RK3399 boards.

In a few months, at least basic stuff will work on Bifrost, but at the moment the status hasn't even got to rendering triangles.

From IRC:

Meanwhile progress on Bifrost is either very slow or very fast depending on perspective.
Starting codegen means "get loops working on day #1"
It's a lot more work upfront but I'm trying to prevent a lot of rewriting things later
And a lot of the basic stuff is copy/paste from midgard anyway
So it means it'll take a lot longer to get es2tri running, but also overall much faster to go from 0 to conformant

[chewitt]

Odroid N2 (G52), Khadas VIM3 (G52) and VIM3L (G31) are the only SBC devices that I know of shipping with Bifrost chips. All are Amlogic SoCs with upstreaam u-boot and kernel support so are good for testing. Pretty much any Amlogic S905X2/X3 or S922X/A311D Android box can be converted too, but then you have to contend with vendor/bsp u-boot and maybe some copy/paste to create a working device-tree file. None of them are currently usable with Panfrost, but that will change as development progresses

The Rockchip devices recommended by archsway are Midgard devices so work great with panfrost but won't be much use for testing Bifrost!