Panfrost Gallium3D Seeing Some Work Towards Clover OpenCL Support

The Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver matured into good shape over the course of 2020 with providing OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware. As we enter 2021 it will be interesting to see this year if any "Panfrost Vulkan" driver materializes for open-source Vulkan support on the newer Mali graphics hardware. But at least one area making interesting process is in regards to OpenCL compute support.

There is a CL branch under development for OpenCL support with Arm Mali "Midgard" hardware. Early Arm Mali Midgard (T600 series) is capable of OpenCL 1.1 full profile support while the Mali T700/T800 Midgard hardware can support OpenCL 1.2 full profile. It's with the newer Mali Bifrost (and Valhall) that can handle OpenCL 2.0 (and CL 3.0) support.

This OpenCL support is a work in progress and like the other drivers and their CL compute support in Gallium3D is ultimately about leveraging the "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker. Much of the heavy lifting is already done by Gallium3D and the Panfrost driver supporting NIR, etc.

The CL branch in full has yet to be merged but some of the early code around compute support for Midgard was merged this New Year's Day. We'll see how much more of this Panfrost compute code manages to land over the next month for making it into Mesa 21.0.