Development On The Chai Mali T700 Open-Source GPU Driver To Resume

Last year we covered the work on the project "Chai" as an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Mali T700 series. After a hiatus, the lead developer is back working on the project.

The developer on the project was previously just known as "Cafe Beverage", but this developer has come out today as Alyssa Rosenzweig.

With Alyssa using an ASUS C201 Chromebook with Rockchip RK3288 there is Libreboot support for freeing the system down to the firmware, but its Mali T760 GPU can still only be used by the proprietary driver. This is Alyssa's original motivation for starting work on this driver and part of the renewed interest in working on this driver now that Alyssa is using the laptop full-time.

More details within Rosenzweig's post My Name Is Cafe Beverage. There was also a screenshot passed along here provided by Alyssa Rosenzweig of a Mali T760 on a RK3288 SoC rendering a triangle, albeit the shaders were precompiled with the binary driver.

The Chai Git repository indicates work is underway on a NIR shader compiler and currently this driver is capable of replaying some basic programs. But they aren't yet to the stage of developing a Mesa driver, etc.