There's a Chromebook, the Asus C201 that will benefit from this. I'm currently running PrawnOS (Debian-based) on it. Wrote a bit about that on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bebm93/linux_on_asus...

Basically this DRM driver plus the companion Panfrost Gallium3D driver merged into mesa 19.1 will enable blob-free 3D graphics on the C201 and other devices that use this chipset.

Right now the DRM kernel driver does not support X11, so it'll be a few more releases before I can really take advantage of it. I have successfully installed it along with and run the kmscube demo outside of X. Pretty exciting development.

With Panfrost, every component of the C201 except the BCM4354 WiFi chip becomes libre. Cypress bought out a division of Broadcom and started releasing datasheets on a bunch of WiFi chips including the BCM4354, which they now tag as CYW4354. (PDF: https://www.cypress.com/file/298141/download)

Not sure if that makes it easier or any more realistic to get blob-free firmware for this chip. I can only hope.

Indeed. This machine is truly unique in the sense that it can be run with no binary blobs. To achieve this one had to disable GPU and WiFi (and use e.g. an Atheros adapter).

Now GPU acceleration will be achievable via open source.

Does the new DRM driver currently work with Wayland compositors? I know Alyssa has demonstrated Weston on Panfrost, but that might've been with ARM's kernel driver or something

Yup, it supports Weston. Possibly more as it does say it supports some Wayland compositors, but only mentions Weston in the example: https://panfrost.freedesktop.org/building-panfrost-mesa.html

It's broken at present, due to exposing BUFFER_AGE which isn't properly implemented. Should be fixed in mesa 19.2.

Oh, good to know. Thanks for sharing that info!

Search for Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Pine64 and FriendlyElec. These companies offer a wide range of $10-$30 dollar single board computers based on Allwinner or Rockchip SOCs (most of which include a Mali GPU).

You can run ARM based Linux distros on them (such as Armbian). Up to now, most people use the ARM proprietary blobs to get OpenGL ES acceleration working on those things.

Lots of SoCs on low cost hobbyist SBCs use Mali GPUs, including those made by Allwinner and Rockchip. In particular the RK3399, which IMO is the best value SoC at the moment with a really decent SBC selection (and the upcoming pinebook pro!). Panfrost is icing on the cake and extremely welcomed.

I believe lots of things based on allwinner are potentially affected here. Orangepi and bananapi for example.

Handy for a lot of the Rockchip boards which are now pretty much completely sorted with mainline kernels. RK3399 boards in particular are capable and interesting.

I was just experimenting with the lima driver on a pinebook last week, it works pretty well!

Zynq Ultrascale+, a family of hybrid CPU+FPGA SOC's uses Mali 400 in some models.

RockPro64 and the Pinebook Pro will benefit from the Panfost drivers. Not sure if anyone has Wayland working on them, but I am optimistic based on the existing progress.

It may be relevant for stuff like LineageOS.

From the top of my head, there's the ones based on Allwinner SoCs, which by now have decent mainline support[0], such as the cubieboard line and the pine64.

[0] https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Asus TinkerBoard is based on this SoC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockchip_RK3288