Eric Smith
is a senior software developer at Collabora.
The Panthor kernel driver and Mesa Panfrost driver combination recently passed an important milestone. It is now officially conformant for OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali-G610 (a chip in the 10th generation of Mali).
This required passing tens of thousands of test cases. Passing these gives hardware implementers and software adopters assurance that the driver is sound. This doesn’t mean that Panthor and Panfrost are bug-free, of course. Software being software, there are always bugs. It does mean that it’s unlikely that there are still major issues. Users can be confident that programs using OpenGL ES 3.1 will ‘just work’ on the tested version of Mesa (24.1.1).
This milestone is naturally just another marker on a long journey. Panfrost had already achieved conformance on Mali G52, as described by Alyssa Rosenzweig. Various other Mesa projects have passed conformance tests, too (such as Zink and NVK).
Looking to the future, we are working on improving Panfrost and Panthor support for all generations of Mali devices. And while the OpenGL ES implementation has passed conformance tests, there is still room for new features and improvements. The future is looking bright for Linux graphics on Arm-based GPUs!