Reverse-Engineering of ARM Mali "Midgard" Now Has A Working NIR Shader Compiler

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Reverse-Engineering of ARM Mali "Midgard" Now Has A Working NIR Shader Compiler

Earlier this year work on the "Chai" open-source Mali T700 GPU driver resumed with an aim to get a working Mesa driver for this "Midgard" graphics architecture. There's still a long battle ahead, but their NIR shader compiler is beginning to work...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chai-ARM-Midgard-To-NIR

[schmidtbag]

Awesome, any progress for Mali is welcome. These are really common chips.
Does anyone know if there's a public "todo list" for Mali?

[Ardje]

/me would donate a T628 mali... (XU4).
I really love the XU4, but with bionic and a chromium simple chromium webgl test it sends me in a spontaneous reboot.
Would be nice to drop the proprietary driver and start with a fixable driver.

[stevecrox]

Whats the target for this? I know Mali is the Arm GPU design can we expect a raft of phones to eventually have a mainlined GPU driver?

[andreano]

From the blog post:

the project name has been properly changed to Panfrost

I like Panfrost better. Was wondering why Chai doesn't spell Midgard backwards (like lima/mali, etnaviv/vivante) or anything. Btw, Bifrost and Midgard are from Norse mythology, while Pan is greek.

[coder]

Her blog has a bad link to the Midgard ISA doc. It should be:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/panfrost/mali-isa-docs/blob/master/Midgard.md

[coder]

Whats the target for this? I know Mali is the Arm GPU design can we expect a raft of phones to eventually have a mainlined GPU driver?

Mali GPUs make their way into all kinds of places - from phones & tablets to Raspberry Pi clones, Chromebooks, in-car entertainment consoles, smart watches, and maybe even future ARM-based desktop PCs.

[coder]

Wow, Liberapay sux. I would make a one-time donation, but no way am I going to subscribe.