Initial Arm Mali "Valhall" Patches Sent Out For Panfrost Linux Kernel Driver

While still a work-in-progress and dependent upon other Arm SoC patches for actual functionality, on Friday the initial Arm Mali "Valhall" patches were sent out for the Panfrost Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver.

Alyssa Rosenzweig of Collabora has been working on reverse engineering and creating open-source driver support for Valhall. Mali's Valhall architecture has been around since 2019 with the Mali G57 and later through the current Mali G610 and G710 graphics. Valhall is a big upgrade over the Bifrost architecture that is where the open-source Panfrost driver stack currently taps out.

The patches sent out by Rosenzweig have been tested with a MediaTek MT8192 SoC and that is where additional patches are currently still pending for mainline Linux kernel support.

The kernel patches are now out for review in their initial form. We'll see if this work manages to get buttoned up in time for Linux v5.18 or if additional time is needed before being ready -- but as it's just a few dozen lines of kernel code, it could feasibly land in the v5.18 cycle. Alyssa is also hoping to get the initial Panfrost/PanVK user-space driver code mainlined for next quarter's Mesa 22.1.