Panfrost

The Panfrost driver stack includes a non-conformant OpenGL ES implementation for Arm Mali GPUs based on the Midgard and Bifrost microarchitectures. The following GPUs are currently supported:

========= ============ ============ ======= Product Architecture OpenGL ES OpenGL ========= ============ ============ ======= Mali T720 Midgard (v4) 2.0 2.1 Mali T760 Midgard (v5) 3.0 3.1 Mali T820 Midgard (v5) 3.0 3.1 Mali T860 Midgard (v5) 3.0 3.1 Mali G72 Bifrost (v6) 3.0 3.1 Mali G31 Bifrost (v7) 3.0 3.1 Mali G52 Bifrost (v7) 3.0 3.1 ========= ============ ============ =======

Other Midgard and Bifrost chips (T604, T620, T830, T880, G71, G51, G76) may work but may be buggy. End users are advised against using Panfrost on unsupported hardware. Developers interested in porting will need to allowlist the hardware (src/gallium/drivers/panfrost/pan_screen.c).

Older Mali chips based on the Utgard architecture (Mali 400, Mali 450) are supported in the Lima driver, not Panfrost. Lima is also available in Mesa.

Work to enable OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenGL 3.1 is on-going for architectures v5 and later (Mali T760 and newer).

Other graphics APIs (Vulkan, OpenCL) are not supported at this time.

Building

Panfrost's OpenGL support is a Gallium driver. Since Mali GPUs are 3D-only and do not include a display controller, Mesa must be additionally built with kmsro support which supports a number of display controllers commonly paired with Mali GPUs. If your board with a Panfrost supported GPU has a display controller with mainline Linux support not supported by kmsro, it's easy to add support, see the commit cff7de4bb597e9 as an example.

LLVM is not required by Panfrost's compilers. LLVM support in Mesa can safely be disabled for most OpenGL ES users with Panfrost.

Build with meson like meson . build/ -Ddri-drivers= -Dvulkan-drivers= -Dgallium-drivers=panfrost,kmsro -Dllvm=false for a build directory build.

Building for Android via the legacy Android.mk system is not officially supported but reportedly works. Your mileage may vary.

For general information on building Mesa, read :doc:the install documentation <../install>.

Chat

Panfrost developers and users hang out on IRC at #panfrost on Freenode.