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Arm Officially Supports Panfrost Open-Source Mali GPU Driver Development

Accepted submission by takyon at 2020-09-18 06:29:59
Software

Arm Officially Supports Panfrost Open-Source Mali GPU Driver Development [cnx-software.com]

Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide a particular bug is not important to them, so you'd be out of luck.

So the developer community has long tried to reverse-engineer GPU drivers with projects like Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), Etnaviv [cnx-software.com] (Vivante), as well as Lima [cnx-software.com] and Panfrost [cnx-software.com] for Arm Mali GPUs. Several years ago, Arm management was not interested at all collaborating with open-source GPU driver development [cnx-software.com] for Mali GPUs, but as noted by Phoronix [phoronix.com], Alyssa Rosenzweig, a graphics software engineer employed by Collabora, explained Panfrost development was now done in partnership with Arm during a talk [youtu.be] at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2020).

[...] So that means a stable Panfrost driver should be expected quite earlier, and possibly with higher quality, than if the company still had to spend time and resources on reverse-engineering.

Related: Pagamigo: FOSS Python Script for PayPal Payments [soylentnews.org] (Alyssa Rosenzweig)
Nvidia Announces $40 Billion Acquisition of Arm Holdings [soylentnews.org]
Nvidia-Branded ARM CPUs; UK Trade Union Speaks Out Against Deal [soylentnews.org]


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