Panfrost Gallium3D Lands Its New Bifrost Scheduler In Mesa 21.1

Hitting Mesa 21.1 this morning is a scheduler implementation for Panfrost Gallium3D, the open-source Arm Mali graphics driver.

Lead Panfrost developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has been working to implement a scheduler in panfrost for the Arm Bifrost graphics code path. The scheduler has been in the works for a number of months and is passing the relevant conformance tests and has now been merged.

Ultimately this scheduler should help the Panfrost Gallium3D driver in better efficiency and performance but at the moment it's still a work-in-progress. The scheduler is currently behaving in-order, spilling work remains, and other features to be tackled. The current Mesa 21.1-devel code also allows disabling the scheduler completely for comparison/benchmark/debug purposes.

More details on this Panfrost scheduler code via this merge request. Mesa 21.1 will be out next quarter with this and many other open-source graphics driver improvements.