Collabora Posts New DRM Kernel Driver For Open-Source Arm Mali Graphics

Collabora's Tomeu Vizoso has posted an initial set of patches he's been working on along with Rob Herring on developing a new open-source kernel DRM driver for Arm's Bifrost and Midgard graphics hardware.

This Panfrost DRM driver goes in-step with the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that was recently merged to mainline Mesa and continues quickly advancing for providing open-source OpenGL support for these two recent generations of Arm Mali GPUs while being developed through reverse-engineering without the official blessing of Arm.

At this early stage the code is running some basic demos, but more work is needed before this will be applicable to end-users. Besides not yet being reviewed by fellow upstream kernel developers, the user-space ABI hasn't been set in stone yet and thus quite isn't ready for the mainline kernel. Hopefully though the Panfrost DRM driver will move along and be accepted into the mainline kernel later this year... It's certainly not material for the now-open Linux 5.1 kernel cycle since the code hasn't been reviewed and uABI not solidified, but we'll see if it moves along fast enough to potentially see it in Linux 5.2.

The initial RFC on the code can be found via this mailing list post. Additional information can also be found on Collabora's blog.