Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Seeing New "BIR" Compiler

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali Gallium3D driver is seeing work on a new driver-specific IR and compiler back-end.

Lead Panfrost developer Alyssa Rosenzweig of Collabora has landed the first bits of the new "BIR" work. This is the Bifrost IR modeled for Arm's Bifrost GPU architecture, a.k.a. the Mali G31 through Mali G76.

This merge request adding the Bifrost IR (BIR) that includes gutting out their old Bifrost compiler code was merged this morning. The new compiler/IR work still appears to be quite primitive at this stage but will be interesting to see it mature as the Mesa 20.1 cycle continues on over the next two months.

This new Bifrost compiler work comes just a week after Panfrost added experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support to this community-based driver effort.