Panfrost Open-Source GPU Driver Continues Advancing For Mali GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Panfrost Open-Source GPU Driver Continues Advancing For Mali GPUs

The Panfrost open-source, community-driven, reverse-engineered graphics driver for ARM Mali graphics processors continues panning out pretty well...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Mali-October-2018

[boxie]

This driver is coming along very nicely! Well done Alyssa (et al) - Keep up the good work!

[Adarion]

So this is a new driver for Mali? Lima is dead? Still active? I'm confused with all the mess in the ARM space. But any effort in terms of getting those pesky chips to fly is welcome.
Iirc. libv was involved in Lima, so is/was this another of his many reverse engineering projects he gave up in the end? Afair they already had a good bunch of 3D stuff already running, don't know about power management, (accelerated) 2D and the likes.

And why the hell aren't HW vendors pushing out specs? 99% of their darn chips are use in a Linux environment and Linux environments just demand freedom drivers, not shitty blobs that are sloppily done and that work only with one Kernel version and one version of X.

[jernej]

So this is a new driver for Mali? Lima is dead? Still active? I'm confused with all the mess in the ARM space.

Lima is still active open source driver for Mali Utgard family (mali4x0) and Panfrost is open source driver for Mali Midgard and Bifrost families. (everything newer that mali450).

AFAIK, libv doesn't work on any of those project.

[starshipeleven]

And why the hell aren't HW vendors pushing out specs? 99% of their darn chips are use in a Linux environment and Linux environments just demand freedom drivers

Sorry what?

embedded device manufacturers want a Linux-based SDK that is stable and won't break their payload application/firmware with updates, that's the only requirement as far as software goes.

[duby229]

Sorry what?

embedded device manufacturers want a Linux-based SDK that is stable and won't break their payload application/firmware with updates, that's the only requirement as far as software goes.

If that's the case then not a single one has ever accomplished it. Sorry...

[schmidtbag]

That's some pretty good progress. Nice to see Mali get some much-needed attention.

[starshipeleven]

If that's the case then not a single one has ever accomplished it. Sorry...

embedded device SDKs are pretty stable, they never receive any update at all.

In that environment having blobs isn't a problem at all, you don't update anything anyway.

[You-]

embedded device SDKs are pretty stable, they never receive any update at all.

In that environment having blobs isn't a problem at all, you don't update anything anyway.

That probably worked well until the invention of the internet. Now everything that is old is full of known exploitable holes (and everything that is new is full of eploitable holes that may not yet be known).

[starshipeleven]

That probably worked well until the invention of the internet. Now everything that is old is full of known exploitable holes (and everything that is new is full of eploitable holes that may not yet be known).

It still works great now, as consumers don't know/care about this.

It's all good and cool to do the "right thing" but if the only thing the average consumer want is cheap shit, most manufacturers will make cheap shit.

There are pretty well-entrenched niches of products and custom firmwares for embedded devices like OpenWrt or Yocto, or LineageOS, so those that want a safe embedded device can use that instead of the laughably vulnerable stock firmware, if they buy a supported device.