Panfrost Gallium3D Picks Up Yet More Features Thanks To Collabora's Summer Internship

Just a few days ago I wrote how the Panfrost Gallium3D driver continues making incredible progress for this community-driven, open-source graphics driver targeting Arm Bifrost/Midgard graphics. There's yet another batch of new features and improvements to talk about.

Most of this feature work continues to be done by Panfrost lead developer Alyssa Rosenzweig who is interning at Collabora this summer and appears to be spending most of her time working on this reverse-engineered Arm graphics driver supporting their recent generations of IP.

Some of the latest Panfrost features to mention include rasterizer discard, better buffer tracking in order to optimize away expensive operations, command stream scoreboarding, making use of Lima's tiling, and other work for Mesa 19.2.

Meanwhile on the mailing list is the initial UBO implementation and other code still being worked on. Given the Mesa 19.2 feature freeze isn't until early August, there still is plenty of time for more Panfrost work to land for this next quarter's update.