Open source Panfrost driver for modern Mali GPUs expands OpenGL support

Collabora have written up a post about their recent work on the Panfrost driver, a free and open source driver for powering modern Mali GPUs found in many devices.

It's been advancing quickly, with it now supporting all the major features of OpenGL ES 2.0. They mentioned some work has even gone into supporting some features of the proper desktop OpenGL 2.1 as well. Thanks to the work done, the Panfrost driver with a Mali G31 chip can now run Wayland compositors with GNOME 3 and it can even do a little gaming along with hardware-accelerated video in some players.

Own a device with a Bifrost generation Mali GPU? All the work that's gone into the Panfrost driver is included already in upstream Mesa but you need to set the "PAN_MESA_DEBUG=bifrost" environment variable for Bifrost currently.

Nice to see Collabora continue advancing Linux graphics across more devices. See their full blog post here, where they go into more technical detail about the work that went into this.