GPU Acceleration with ARM Mali Panfrost

Panfrost is a free and open source driver for Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPU and public code hosting is on GitLab. For ODROID, this GPU acceleration driver is only supported with the Linux kernel 5.10 and later. Since the Panfrost driver is still experimental driver and being updated by the developers, the features and its stability will be greatly improved.

Panfrost and Bifrost driver must not be loaded together in the same system.

Showcase

Ubuntu 20.10 KDE Desktop with ARM Mali Panfrost driver

Install

Panfrost driver is is provided with the kernel package, therefore no additional commands are not required other than kernel package update.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Check if Mali Panfrost driver is loaded

Panfrost is provided as the Linux kernel dirver module, the driver panfrost.ko must be loaded after rebooting.

$ lsmod | grep panfrost
panfrost              69632  0

Test with Mali Panfrost driver

The glmark2 is a good utility to test GPU performance.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install glmark2
$ glmark2

See also

[1] https://panfrost.freedesktop.org/