Collabora recently announced a significant milestone: the Panthor kernel driver and Mesa Panfrost driver have achieved official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1 on the Mali-G610 chip, part of the 10th generation of Mali GPUs, known as “Valhall”.

According to Collabora’s latest news, achieving conformance involved passing tens of thousands of test cases, providing assurance to hardware implementers and software adopters about the reliability of the driver.

While not entirely bug-free, this milestone suggests that major issues are unlikely, ensuring that OpenGL ES 3.1 programs should function correctly on the tested Mesa version (24.1.1).

The conformance tests were conducted on a Rock5b board running Linux 6.10.0-rc1, which includes the new Panthor kernel driver for Mali v10. The RK3588 SoC in the Rock5b is widely used in Arm-based single-board computers, and its upstream support in both Mesa and the kernel facilitates easy graphics acceleration support for Linux distributions.

Addressing the conformance test suite revealed several bugs, mainly subtle race conditions within the driver or rare combinations of formats and operations. Some fixes were specific to Valhall GPUs, while others applied to earlier Mali GPUs, requiring improvements to the Mesa infrastructure that benefited other drivers as well.

This achievement resulted from collaborative efforts by developers at Collabora and others. Boris Brezillon led the Panthor kernel module development with support from Steven Price, Liviu Dudau, and Alyssa Rosenzweig, who initiated the Panfrost project.

As Collabora indicates, looking ahead, the focus will be on enhancing Panfrost and Panthor support across all Mali generations, including:

• Performance counters to assist in optimizing graphics code.
• Device coredump support for debugging firmware and driver issues.
• Support for the new Arm AFRC compression format for frame buffers.
• Improved memory management for better performance in low-memory situations.
• General performance improvements.
• Vulkan support

Further information

For more information, refer to the official Collabora announcement.