The end of “Mali question”?

For several Linaro Connect events we had sessions about state of graphics drivers on ARM platforms. I attended most of them and got a reputation of person asking problematic questions.

But situation has changed. With Panfrost project happening. It is a Foss driver for Arm Mali Midgard graphics chipset (Bifrost support on a way). It went from “wow, a triangle” to “we can play some games or run a desktop” in quite short time.

At BKK19 Linaro Connect we had “State of opensource drivers for mobile GPU chips” session. Freedreno, Etnaviv, vc4, v3d, Panfrost, Lima etc. What they target, what was already achieved, what are plans. Great progress across whole ARM world. And several questions from the audience. And interesting answers as well.

Mali then. Grant Likely from Arm told that they are looking how Panfrost is going. From company perspective both Midgard and Bifrost chips are “done, in a field” product which will not get changes. Still — engineering support goes entirely into their binary drivers as this is what their customers are using. Situation may change if those customers start asking for open drivers.

I do not use any Arm hardware with Mali GPU anymore. But hope that at next Linaro Connect instead of asking famous “Mali question” we will rather discuss how it runs on our devices.

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