Panthor DRM Driver Set For Linux 6.9, Arm Mali Gen10 Merged To Panfrost Gallium3D

It looks like the new Panthor DRM driver will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel now that it made it into drm-misc-next today. In turn the Mesa 24.1-devel code has landed support for this newer Arm Mali graphics into the Panfrost Gallium3D driver.

The new Panthor DRM driver is for supporting newer Arm Mali Gen10 graphics hardware going by the CSF acronymn for sporting the new Command Stream Frontend that in turn led to this being a new DRM driver rather than tacking on to the existing Direct Rendering Manager code. The Arm Mali Command Stream Frontend does depend upon a new binary blob for operation with it being a firmware-based command stream queue for handling job submission.

As of this morning the new Arm Mali Panthor driver led by Boris Brezillon with Collabora has been queued into drm-misc-next. Assuming a new drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next is submitted in the days ahead, this driver in turn will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle.

With hitting drm-misc-next, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver support for Arm Mali Gen10 / CSF hardware was merged to Mesa 24.1-devel Git today for supporting OpenGL on the newer Mali graphics hardware in conjunction with the Panthor kernel driver. See this merge for the Mesa Panfrost enablement. Much of this development work so far has been focused on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC.