Collabora has announced that Khronos has certified its Panfrost graphics driver, which has successfully passed all of the Khronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS) tests and is fully compliant with the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification. The driver is certified using the Mali-G52 GPU, but it is planned to be certified for other chips at a later date. In particular, uncertified support for OpenGL ES 3.1 has already been implemented for Mali-G31 and Mali-G72 chips, which have an architecture similar to Mali-G52. Mali-T860 GPUs and older chips are not yet fully compatible with OpenGL ES 3.1.
Obtaining a certificate makes it possible to officially declare compatibility with graphic standards and use Khronos trademarks associated with them. The certification also opens the door for using the Panfrost driver in commercial products that include the Mali G52 GPU. The test was performed in an environment with a Debian GNU/Linux 11 distribution, Mesa and X.Org X Server 1.20.11. Certification fixes and improvements have already been backported to the Mesa 21.2 branch and included in yesterday's Mesa 21.2.2 release.
The Panfrost driver was founded in 2018 by Alyssa Rosenzweig of Collabora and evolved from reverse engineering of original ARM drivers. Since the last code, the developers have established cooperation with ARM, which provided the necessary information and documentation. The driver currently supports chips based on Midgard (Mali-T6xx, Mali-T7xx, Mali-T8xx) and Bifrost (Mali G3x, G5x, G7x) microarchitectures. For the Mali 400/450 GPUs used in many older chips based on the ARM architecture, the Lima driver is being developed separately.
Source: opennet.ru