"Panthor" DRM Driver Coming Together For Newer Arm Mali GPUs

Being worked on recently by Boris Brezillon at Collabora is Panthor, a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for supporting the newer Arm Mali graphics processors.

Panthor is for supporting newer Mali GPUs that implement Arm's v10 GPU architecture. One of the main focuses is on the new Command Stream Frontend "CSF" as a replacement to its prior Job Manager interface. The CSF provides a firmware-driven command stream queue that is used by both kernel and user-space drivers for job submission to the GPU.

The initial Panthor driver development has been focused on enabling the GPU of the Rockchip RK3588, which features a Mali-G610 MC4 GPU. The Panthor DRM driver is designed from the start to support modern Vulkan API needs like sparse memory bindings.

Besides the Panthor DRM kernel driver, there is this Mesa merge request for supporting this new driver and the Mali v10/CSF hardware by the Panfrost Gallium3D driver and PanVK Vulkan driver.

Those wanting to learn more about this Linux DRM Panthor driver project that remains under active development can find the newly-published code on the mailing list.