The open source Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs has now achieved official conformance on Mali-G52 for OpenGL ES 3.1, as seen on the Khronos adopters list. This important milestone is a step forward for the open source driver, as it now certifies Panfrost for use in commercial products containing Mali G52 and paves the way for further conformance submissions on other Mali GPUs.
Excellent news, and great progress.
OpenGL issue can be a dull affair for anyone not of the faith but this is indeed excellent news. Hearing “OpenGL conformant driver” produces a lovely seratonin buzz.
OpenGL has always been well documented and conformance tests actually mean something. OpenGL has also been well dcoumented since the beginning, and the OpenGL ARB now Khronos has always been a good forum for progressing standards and vendor and consumer and developer buy-in. Linux take note…
Wait. Didn’t Khronos take over the OpenGL spec specifically because the OpenGL ARB process was so completely terrible at moving the standard forward?
It wasn’t the process it was the people. But the OpenGL specification didn’t need to shift that much as extentions handled most of the change. It just needed rolling up into a new version number every now and again. The allegations of slow are true but only to a point. It was slower than it should have been as abilities evolved compared to Microsoft who threw the kitchen sink at pushing D3D. While Microsoft were trumpeting D3D OpenGL in practice already had what D3D had. Where they did get slow was handling the transition from the standard pipeline to the new pipeline and that’s where things hit the wall for a while as Khronos was slow to gain momentum.
The OpenGL ARB model along with specifications and documentation standards is a good model or inspiration for a lot of things. I include Linux in this especially as the thing is a mess.