Mesa PanVK Vulkan Driver Sees Initial Support For Arm Mali 2nd Gen Valhall GPUs

Merged yesterday into the code for Mesa 24.3 is initial support within the PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali v10 graphics hardware. The v10 architecture is for second-gen Valhall GPUs and goes along with the ongoing Linux kernel driver work for the Panthor CSF-based driver support.

For 2nd Gen Valhall like the Mali-G78 and Mali-G68 there is very early support now within the PanVK driver. But as noted in the Mesa merge request it's "enough to get vkcube running" but still a long ways to go overall in the Vulkan driver support:

"This is an attempts at implementing enough of the CSF backend to get simple graphics/compute workload to run on v10. We're in no way approaching 1.0 conformance, but at least, once we have the basic blocks merged, we can get all the missing features developed in parallel."

This work was carried out by Boris Brezillon with Collabora and so for next quarter's Mesa 24.3 release at least 2nd Gen Valhall Mali GPUs will be able to enjoy basic Vulkan support when using the Panthor kernel driver. Besides there being more work needed on this 2nd Gen Valhall support, there still are three newer Valhall generations to address with Arm currently being up to its 5th Gen architecture with the likes of the Mali G725 and Immortalis G925.

See this merge for more details on this initial Arm Mali v10 support.