Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2019

Over the past years support for the different Arm Mali series of GPUs has been crystalizing in the Open Source space.

The first few steps towards supporting some Arm GPUs hardware were taken in 2012, and was aimed towards the low-end Mali 2/400 series of GPUs.
While this work showed that it was indeed possible to create an Open Source driver, it would be a long time until the Lima driver actually materialized.

Very much unlike the Open Source driver for the Mali 2/400 series of GPUs, support for the Mali-T and Mali-G series started to be looked at only in 2017. Since then development has progressed at a furious pace. The mesa driver, Panfrost, has now been merged and provides initial support for the T700 and T800 series of GPUs based on the Midgard architecture.

In this talk Robert will walk you through the process of creating a driver for a new GPU, from reverese engineering to upstreaming and then finally shipping a new Open Source driver.