Collabora announced that Khronos has certified the Panfrost graphics driver on systems with Mali GPUs based on the Valhall (Mali-G57) microarchitecture. The driver has successfully passed all tests of the CTS (Khronos Conformance Test Suite) and is recognized as fully compatible with the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification. Last year, a similar certification was passed for the Mali-G52 GPU based on the Bifrost microarchitecture.
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 products that include Mali G52 and G57 GPUs. For example, the Mali-G57 GPU is used in Chromebook laptops based on MediaTek MT8192 and MT8195 SoCs.
The test was performed in an environment with a Debian GNU/Linux 12 distribution, Mesa and X.Org X Server 1.21.1.3. Certification fixes and improvements have already been ported to Mesa and will be part of the 22.2 release. Related changes for the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel subsystem have been submitted for inclusion in the mainstream Linux kernel.
The Panfrost driver was founded in 2018 by Alyssa Rosenzweig of Collabora and evolved from reverse engineering of original ARM drivers. Since the year before last, 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), Bifrost (Mali G3x, G5x, G7x) and Valhall (Mali G57+) 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