Panfrost Driver For Linux 6.4 Adds Speed Binning, New MediaTek SoCs

The Panfrost DRM driver providing open-source kernel graphics driver support for modern Arm Mali graphics in various SoCs is seeing some new hardware support for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle as well as now supporting speed binning functionality.

With this week's drm-misc-next pull request of new feature work being submitted to DRM-Next in preparation for Linux 6.4, there are several notable Panfrost driver additions.

New hardware supported by the Panfrost driver includes MediaTek's MT8183, MT8186, MT8192, and MT8195 SoCs. The MT8183 is also known as the MediaTek Kompanio 500 as an entry-level Chromebook platform with Mali-G72 MP3 graphics. The MT8186 is known as the Kompanio 520 with a Mali G52-MC2 2EE GPU. The MT8192 as the Kompanio 820 meanwhile has Mali-G57 MC5 graphics. Lastly is the MT8195 Kompanio 1200 with Mali-G57 graphics. These MediaTek SoCs used in various Chromebooks and other devices will work with the mainline Panfrost DRM driver on Linux 6.4.

Also added to drm-misc-next is initial support for speed binning. Some SoCs with Arm Mali graphics may need to be limied to a lower frequency as specified within non-volatile memory or eFuses that layout the speed binning details. This speed binning for Mali GPUs isn't entirely artificial by the vendors but can relate to the quality of the silicon in use and thus may need to run at a lower frequency/power to avoid issues.

More details on this week's drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.4 via this pull request.