A little while ago, I wrote about Imagination’s PowerVR CLDNN Neural Network SDK and Image for Acer Chromebook R13, and some people looks into the Arch Linux Arm image and were pleasantly surprised to find Vulkan drivers, as it was the first Arm platform support Vulkan in Linux.
It looks like there are now more Arm hardware supporting Vulkan drivers in Linux, as Arm has released binary user-space components for GNU/Linux and Android for development platforms featuring the Arm Mali Midgard GPU family, and – provided the GPU can handle it – supporting the following APIs: OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.2, OpenCL 1.1 / 1.2 / 2.0, Vulkan 1.0, and RenderScript.
Mali-G71 GPU is supported by Android 8.0 and Linux (fbdev) ARM64 drivers for Hikey 960 board, and Mali-T760 should be supported by Linux drivers (fbdev / wayland / X11) for Firefly-RK3288 board.
Hikey 960 and Firefly-RK3288 drivers don’t have specific files about Vulkan, but I’ve downloaded and extracted Linux fbdev drivers, and could find some Vulkan functions with:
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cd fbdev/ objdump -T libmali.so | grep -Eo 'vk[A-Z].*' | sort vkAcquireNextImageKHR vkAllocateCommandBuffers vkAllocateDescriptorSets vkAllocateMemory vkBeginCommandBuffer vkBindBufferMemory vkBindImageMemory vkCmdBeginQuery |
Odroid XU3 (Mali-T628 MP6 GPU) and Juno (Mali-T624 MP4 GPU) boards – also listed on that page – did not get any updates, but HiKey (Mali-450 MP4 GPU) development boards got new binary user-space Android 8.1 GPU drivers. Vulkan won’t be supported on those boards however, since the Mali-450 MP4 and Mali-T62x GPUs are not in the list of Vulkan conformant Mali GPUs on Arm developer’s site.
Thanks to Nobe for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
