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From Bifrost to Panfrost – deep dive into the first render

collabora.com

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Re: From Bifrost to Panfrost – deep dive into the first render

#11

Post by gpugpugpugpu »

robert_foss wrote: post #4
dmos62 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a device with a Mali Midgard or Bifrost GPU. I'm excited about getting HW acceleration on it. Anyone has insight about the usability of the driver at the moment? Alos, why are developers interested in it? Surely there are loads of GPUs without open source drivers.

The Midgard support is quite mature, expect most usecases to work & some to outperform the vendor driver. Bifrost support is very new, testing this I would expect to run in to show-stoppers and severe issues. But this is the very early days of bifrost support, and support is going to get better at a rapid pace. As for why people want this; The Vendor driver is inflexible in various ways and ARM stops supporting HW af…

Midgard still gets new driver versions with bugfixes despite being more than five years old.

Re: From Bifrost to Panfrost – deep dive into the first render

#12

Post by floatboth »

monocasa wrote: post #10
floatboth wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Midgard is usable - GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma usable.. even SuperTuxKart with GLES3 usable now: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/02/27/expe... Bifrost is quite early as you can see from the article this thread is for. > Surely there are loads of GPUs without open source drivers Mali is very popular (so many SoCs from Rockchip, Amlogic, Allwinner, etc.) and actually was sort of the last holdout among…

I spent a while playing with PowerVR trying to reverse it on my beaglebone. It's a huge pain, they feel like an order of magnitude more effort than Mali cores to get running with free drivers as they run a full RTOS on their GPU cores. They also have tons of bugs they hack around on a per rev basis around the caching and virtual memory systems which means your reversed code will sort of work for a bit, then start mys…

RTOS on.. SIMD units?? o_0

Re: From Bifrost to Panfrost – deep dive into the first render

#14

Post by monocasa »

floatboth wrote: post #12
monocasa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a while playing with PowerVR trying to reverse it on my beaglebone. It's a huge pain, they feel like an order of magnitude more effort than Mali cores to get running with free drivers as they run a full RTOS on their GPU cores. They also have tons of bugs they hack around on a per rev basis around the caching and virtual memory systems which means your reversed code will sort of work for a bit, then start mys…

RTOS on.. SIMD units?? o_0

Most unified shader GPUs have the same semantics, they just run the priority thread scheduler in hardware. PowerVR was being cute and saving gates and their power cost by making the shader cores themselves handle all that rather than a dedicated hardware block.
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