At the XDC2020 conference (X.Org Developers Conference) on joining ARM to the project development process , which develops an open driver for Mali video cores. ARM Company Provide driver developers with the information and documentation they need to better understand the hardware and focus their development efforts, without wasting time solving the puzzles of reverse engineering binary drivers. Previously, this happened with the connection of Qualcomm to work on the project. developing a free driver for the Qualcomm Adreno GPU.
ARM's participation will help bring the implementation's stability to the point of being ready for widespread use and provide greater support for Mali GPU-specific internal instructions by providing first-hand information about the chip architecture. Availability of internal documentation will also help ensure maximum performance, full compliance with specifications and coverage of all available features of Midgard and Bifrost GPUs.
The first changes prepared on the basis of information received from ARM are already into the driver code base. In particular,
work has been done to bring instruction packing operations to the canonical form and completely rework the disassembler to more accurately reflect the architecture of the GPU Bifrost instruction set and correspond to the terminology adopted in ARM.
The Panfrost driver was founded in 2018 by Alyssa Rosenzweig of Collabora and has so far evolved from reverse engineering of the original ARM drivers. The driver currently supports chips based on Midgard (Mali-T6xx, Mali-T7xx, Mali-T8xx) and Bifrost (Mali G3x, G5x, G7x) microarchitectures. For Mali 400/450 GPUs used in many older chips based on the ARM architecture, a driver is being developed separately .
Source: opennet.ru