Mali G72 Now Supported By Open-Source Panfrost Gallium3D Driver

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU.

Adding to the many Panfrost open-source driver accomplishments this year is now support for the G72 as their latest support addition. The Mali G72 has been around since late 2017 and is making use of the second-generation Bifrost architecture. The Mali G72 is used by the likes of the Kirin 970, Samsung Exynos 9 9810, Exynos 7 9610, and Helio P60/P70 SoCs.

With a merge request that landed today into Mesa 20.3-devel by Collabora developer Boris Brezillon is the G72 support. This Panfrost Gallium3D driver code was tested with a Duet Chromebook.

Hopefully it won't be much longer before seeing the Mali G76 support and then the Arm Valhall graphics support. Perhaps with Arm's support we will also see work get underway on an open-source Vulkan driver.