Panfrost Gallium3D Is Now Running Kodi & Some Games For This Open-Source Mali Driver

In the one year that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been coming together for open-source, reverse-engineered support for Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost hardware, it's been making a lot of progress in what it's capable of running atop this Mesa driver.

Panfrost driver lead developer Alyssa Rosenzweig shared that Panfrost has matured to the point that it can now run real-world applications like the Kodi HTPC software amd select OpenGL games like SuperTuxKart and Neverball. It's still a long way off the capabilities of the proprietary driver, which also supports OpenCL and Vulkan, but not too bad for a community-based, reverse-engineering driver effort with limited resources.

Panfrost is now passing texture format tests for OpenGL ES 3.0, various performance optimizations continue being worked on and landing, and 3D games are "beginning to show signs of life."

They are approaching OpenGL ES 2.0 feature completeness for this Arm Mali open-source driver and will continue pursuing more performance optimizations and other features.

More details on the current state of the Panfrost Gallium3D driver can be found via Rosenzweig's blog.