PanVK Started For Open-Source Vulkan On Arm Mali GPUs

Panfrost has been the Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPus while now "PanVK" is in development as an open-source Vulkan driver.

Boris Brezillon formally announced the start of PanVK today. With Panfrost Gallium3D becoming quite mature, PanVK is the new focus in providing Vulkan API support for Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost GPUs.

PanVK is already in good enough shape to run the basic Vulkan cube demo but is not yet a conformant driver nor running most real-world applications. Performance optimizations also haven't yet been a focus until all core features are in place.

For now the PanVK driver is being developed via this GitLab repository until it's in good enough shape for upstreaming into Mesa. This initial PanVK Vulkan driver code is based on Freedreno's TURNIP Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware and information learned through the Panfrost Gallium3D code. In its current and still early form, this Arm Mali open-source Vulkan driver comes in at just over eleven thousand lines of code.