"Panthor" DRM Driver Coming Together For Newer Arm Mali GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "Panthor" DRM Driver Coming Together For Newer Arm Mali GPUs

Being worked on recently by Boris Brezillon at Collabora is Panthor, a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for supporting the newer Arm Mali graphics processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Panthor-DRM-Newer-Mali

[You-]

I am looking forward to this as then I will be able to use Fedora/Silverblue/[Any distro with upstream only kernels] with my Rock 5 which is currently a paperweight for me without the BSP kernel as that is needed for a GUI.

Spring distribution releases should put it in good shape

[AlanSMac]

Thank goodness this is making progress. I've had a terrible start with the orange pi 5 plus. This will help the main remaining problem

[MastaG]

So how is Panfrost doing on this GPU if you pair it with the bsp kernel?

[Nille]

I'm glad that there is now movement. Until now only the RPI where more or less a valid option if you want good upstream support.

[xpris]

I use mainline kernel 6.6 with panthor patches paired with mesa 23.3.0 panthor on Rock5b on OpenMandriva Cooker. Works great but some stuff still not working as sound via HDMI. To make it works my distro pulling patches from other kernels and so far works. GPU performance is a bit worse than on Mali binary blob but it is acceptable. I can play open arena with 90 FPS at medium/high setting. So not that bad. Now waiting for implementing more extension to panVK - because current state is really bad. Also it would be good to port hardware decode/encode stack to mainline bc. right now it is not supported here (only on radxa kernels).

[nyanmisaka]

Some fun stuff in case anyone wants to try it:

back-ported Panthor on Rockchip BSP Linux 6.1.25 kernel

https://github.com/hbiyik/linux/commits/linux-6.1-gen-rkr6%2Bpanthor

Panthor & forward-ported MPP/RGA on mainline Linux 6.7-rc kernel

https://github.com/hbiyik/linux/commits/panthor%2Bmpp%2Brga

[kpedersen]

I am looking forward to this as then I will be able to use Fedora/Silverblue/[Any distro with upstream only kernels] with my Rock 5 which is currently a paperweight for me without the BSP kernel as that is needed for a GUI.

One of the best parts of Linux is it is a duct tape mess. Can you not just grab the BSP kernel and use that with any distro you like?

I was in a similar boat with the full fat Ubuntu/Gnome image that comes with the Jetson Nano. It is pretty terrible to use; so I tend to just debootstrap a clean Debian and grab the BSP _dirty kernel.

[DrYak]

Can you not just grab the BSP kernel and use that with any distro you like?

Not everyone is okay using some antediluvian kernel version 4.14.168 or whatever, compiled for Android, in all of its 0-day golry.

[You-]

One of the best parts of Linux is it is a duct tape mess. Can you not just grab the BSP kernel and use that with any distro you like?

I was in a similar boat with the full fat Ubuntu/Gnome image that comes with the Jetson Nano. It is pretty terrible to use; so I tend to just debootstrap a clean Debian and grab the BSP _dirty kernel.

From what I remember, there were many shortcomings of the BSP kernel. You couldnt even use upstream mesa.

On top of that I dont like how inefficient the Arm hodgepodge can be and i will wait for the mainlining of the features, there has been steady progress. Once this is complete we do not need to get specific versions of specific distros with specific limitations to work on the board.