Panfrost Open-Source Mali Driver Now Has A Winsys Working With ARM's Kernel Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Panfrost Open-Source Mali Driver Now Has A Winsys Working With ARM's Kernel Driver

Open-source driver developer Tomeu Vizoso of Collabora has taken to some Panfrost driver work for greatly enhancing the viability of this open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Winsys-ARM-Kernel

[techzilla]

I've been irritated by us lacking proper Mali support for a long time, and have checked through a bunch of GPU driver projects to see how a this driver could be written. The problem I want discussed, and talked about, is how we to get a soft IP based GPU like Mali to be given a driver separated from the display chipset. In other words, do we have a major architecture limitation, which would explain why after so many years nobody can make drivers for this entire market of devices?

Think about this...

if the GPU or display chipset must be coded together, and it might even be so bad that code on each side is required for each combination, then the board will be past production and superseded by the time the project begins coding. The reason this hasn't been a problem for any earlier GPU drivers is quite simple, the display chipset and GPU were combined by one vendor. In the case of Mali nothing could be further from the conditions of the market, and this is where our eco-system has failed consistently.

Linux cannot move out of the server market, UNLESS the hardware is controlled completely within one vender, and promoting monopolies harms the software user community at least as much as lacking source. Can it be fixed... sure, anything can be fixed, but it can't be the disruptive force it was in new markets without the will to succeed.

Obviously I support any effort to build a Mali driver, and why haven't they crowd funded yet, after coming up with a VERY good plan?

[microcode]

Very cool that they managed this now, because it means that the official ARM kernel driver can be considered for upstreaming.

[rhysk]

I've been irritated by us lacking proper Mali support for a long time, and have checked through a bunch of GPU driver projects to see how a this driver could be written. The problem I want discussed, and talked about, is how we to get a soft IP based GPU like Mali to be given a driver separated from the display chipset. In other words, do we have a major architecture limitation, which would explain why after so many years nobody can make drivers for this entire market of devices?
...

Obviously I support any effort to build a Mali driver, and why haven't they crowd funded yet, after coming up with a VERY good plan?

I believe there are already render-only drivers in Mesa, such as Tegra and Etnaviv where the display block is separate from the GPU render block.

Some of this code was originally written for Etnaviv and then could be reused by Tegra in early 2017. It's common code in Mesa.

[dcbaker]

I believe there are already render-only drivers in Mesa, such as Tegra and Etnaviv where the display block is separate from the GPU render block.

Some of this code was originally written for Etnaviv and then could be reused by Tegra in early 2017. It's common code in Mesa.

There's actually three such drivers in mesa right now: vc4/pl111, etnaviv/imx, and nouveau/tegra.

[pal666]

Linux cannot move out of the server market

linux is the most used user-facing operating system on earth. smartphones are not servers

[pal666]

Very cool that they managed this now, because it means that the official ARM kernel driver can be considered for upstreaming.

after complete rewrite, as usual

[Ardje]

linux is the most used user-facing operating system on earth. smartphones are not servers

Don't forget TV's, camera's (user interface), cars.

[andrei_me]

This work was sponsored by Collabora or was a spare time work from Vizoso?

EDIT: Just finished to read the blog post, it was a sponsored effort, nice one Collabora

[chewitt]

And.. here's an Amlogic S912 (Mali T820) running Kodi v18 on 4.19.3 with panfrost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pv6M2InOWU