Mali-GPU

Proprietary Mali UMD
(User Mode Driver)

ARM provides proprietary User Mode Driver (UMD). These drivers offer optimized performance and full feature support for ARM’s proprietary Mali GPU implementations.

Features:

• Optimized performance
• Proprietary support and updates
• Used in production on many commercial devices

Opensource Panfrost inside MESA

The Panfrost driver stack includes an OpenGL ES & regular OpenGL implementation for Arm Mali GPUs for Midgard and newer microarchitectures.

Features:

• Community-driven development
• GPL-licensed (free and open)
• PanVK for Vulkan 1.4 support
• Transparent code and security

Official Website: Panfrost Landing Page

Proprietary Mali DDK
(Device Driver Kit)

ARM’s proprietary kernel driver component provides direct hardware access and low-level GPU management for the Mali GPU. It works alongside the proprietary UMD.

Features:

• Direct hardware access
• Optimized resource management
• Integrated with proprietary UMD

Downsides

• Proprietary implementation
• Starting from DDK version r52, GPUs up to Bifrost are no longer supported.

Opensource Panfrost / Panthor / Tyr

Panfrost and Panthor are open-source drivers for Mali GPUs developed by the community and collaborating organizations (Mainly collabora with the support of ARM). Panfrost supports older Mali GPU generations (Midgard and newer), while Panthor is the modern replacement supporting newer CSF architectures starting with v10 Valhall.

Tyr is the upcoming Rust implementation of Panthor.

Features:

• Part of the mainline Linux kernel
• Active community maintenance
• Transparent hardware abstraction