Company Collabora about bringing the functionality of the driver on devices with GPU Bifrost () to a state suitable for running a 3D rendering system, including basic texture support.
At the initial stage, the Panfrost driver was mainly focused on implementing support for Midgard chips, but now attention has also been paid to Bifrost chips, which are close to Midgard in the field of command flow, but have significant differences in instructions for executing shaders and interfaces between shaders and command flow.
The developers have prepared an initial implementation of the shader compiler that supports a set of internal instructions specific to the GPU Bifrost. In the future, the compiler is planned to include support for extended instructions that allow you to assemble more complex shaders. The changes have been committed to the Mesa codebase and will be part of the next major 20.1 release.
The Panfrost driver is developed based on reverse engineering of the original drivers from ARM, designed to work with 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