Arm engineer Karunika Choo has been leading the effort to enable support for the latest Mali GPUs within the open-source and upstream “Panthor” DRM kernel graphics driver for Linux. This work includes being able to enable the latest Mali 5th Gen GPUs on this open-source graphics driver.
Published on Monday were the latest round of patches for enabling support for newer Mali GPUs with the Panthor driver. For end-users the exciting aspect is enabling support for the Mali G310, G510, G710, G715, G720,and G725 series.
This is notable with the Mali G725 having just been introduced one year ago and being based on their 5th Gen architecture and supporting all of the latest and greatest mobile GPU features while being just one step below the Immortalis G925.
In current form this hardware enablement patch series is just around 200 lines of new code and around half of that is reworked code. There is also new Arm Mali firmware blobs needed for this hardware support in conjunction with these patches. Updates to the Mesa driver code will also be needed for OpenGL/Vulkan support on these newer SoCs.
These patches are against the current Panthor driver while in case you missed it Tyr is in development as a modern, Rust-based Arm Mali kernel driver that has yet to be mainlined to the Linux kernel tree and will likely be some time before it’s in comparable maturity to Panthor.
