Panfrost's Vulkan Driver Progressing On Compute Shaders

PanVK as Panfrost's open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa for Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing progress on handling compute shaders.

Jason Ekstrand, the former Intel Linux graphics driver engineer who joined Collabora to work on anything around open-source Linux graphics, has been working on PanVK among other Mesa bits.

With this merge request now in Mesa 22.1-devel, compute shader support is wired up for PanVK. Of the impact Ekstrand summed it up as, "This fixes about 10k [conformance test suite] tests and causes a pile more to go from crash to fail."

The 800+ lines of new code replace some previously stubbed out code, add support for storage images, support for compute pipelines, storage buffers, and also supporting push constants. With Panfrost Gallium3D fairly mature now for OpenGL on Arm Mali Bifrost/Midgard hardware, it's good seeing the PanVK Vulkan driver seeing more progress.