More Vulkan goodness arrives in Mesa with the PanVK driver for Arm Mali Midgard & Bifrost

Collabora has given word that another exciting development has been made for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, as the new PanVK Vulkan driver has landed in Mesa.

The work from Collabora (and others) has been a long road, getting basic OpenGL up to scratch on these Arm GPUs which they've blogged about quite a lot. Most recently their Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote about achieving OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost.

Now the next stage of open source graphics drivers for Arm Mali has been hit, with the PanVK experimental driver now actually landing in Mesa upstream. This is a big step since it means all work can now go into Mesa properly, allowing even more people to contribute to it. Right now though, it's not quite suitable for everyday use, as PanVK is "lacking a lot of features, optimizations and many things are just not implemented the right way".

Hopefully now then it won't be long before Arm Mali, at least on Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, will see great out of the box graphical support on Linux. The more devices we can have where Linux works and performs well, the better. It gives system builders and consumers more options overall.