Rosenzweig – Passing the reins on Panfrost
10 Apr 2023
At this time is my final day at Collabora and my final day main the Panfrost driver.
It’s been a wild journey.
In 2017, I started work on the chai driver for Mali T (Midgard). chai would later be merged into Lyude Paul’s and Connor Abbott’s BiOpenly venture for Mali G (Bifrost) to kind Panfrost.
In 2019, I joined Collabora to speed up work on the motive force stack. The preliminary objective was to run GNOME on a Mali-T860 Chromebook.
At this time, Panfrost helps a broad spectrum of Mali GPUs, conformant to the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification on Mali-G52 and Mali-G57. It’s arduous to overstate how far we’ve come. I’ve had the thrills of architecting a number of backend shader compilers in addition to the Gallium-based OpenGL driver, whereas my pricey colleague Boris Brezillon has put collectively a proof-of-concept Vulkan driver which I feel you’ll hear extra about quickly.
Recently, my focus has been making certain the venture can stand by itself 4 legs. I’ve each confidence in different Collaborans hacking on Panfrost, together with Boris and Italo Nicola. The venture has a shiny future. It’s time for me to go the reins.
I’m nonetheless alive. I plan to proceed engaged on Mesa drivers for a very long time, together with the frequent infrastructure upon which Panfrost depends. And I’ll nonetheless ship the odd Panfrost patch every now and then. That stated, my focus will shift.
I’m not able to announce what’s in retailer but… however possibly you may learn between the traces!