Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor.
The Arm Mali G1 Pro / Premium / Ultra GPUs are a continuation of the Mali 5th Gen DVS architecture like the Mali G720 / G725 and Immortalis G925. Sent out today were the first ten driver patches amounting to around one thousand lines of new code for enabling the Mali-G1 series GPUs with the Panthor Direct Rendering Manager driver. Panthor is the upstream, open-source DRM kernel graphics driver for supporting Arm’s recent Mali GPUs.
There is also now the Rust-written “Tyr” driver in the Linux 6.18 kernel albeit that driver is still in the early stages of development as a Rust alternative to the C-based Panthor driver. Eventually the Tyr driver will end up supporting Arm’s G1 GPUs too but for now that Rust driver isn’t production-ready like Panthor.
Arm engineer Karunika Choo explained of this initial Mali-G1 GPU open-source driver support:
“This patch series extends the Panthor driver with basic support for Mali-G1 GPUs.
The v14 architecture introduces several hardware and register-level changes compared to prior GPUs. This series adds the necessary architecture-specific support infrastructure, power control and reset handling for Mali-G1 GPUs.”
The patch series is now out for review. Great seeing Arm being quite timely in getting their G1 GPU open-source driver support published.
