The PanVK driver for modern Arm Mali Vulkan driver support within Mesa has tapped into Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality as well as an in-memory cache to provide for a better experience with this open-source driver.

Faith Ekstrand of Collabora implemented the in-memory cache and on-disk shader cache support last week for this Arm Vulkan driver. Thanks to building off existing Mesa shared functionality, it was just a few dozen lines of code to implement and provides some immediate wins thanks to this caching.

Ekstrand commented on the benefits within the [1]merge request :

"This little MR adds a memory cache to help cache lazy apps and avoid doing too much re-compilation as well as enabling Mesa's disk cache for panvk. Hopefully this reduces app stuttering as well as CTS run times. It cuts half an hour off the CTS run time on my Mediatek v13 Chromebook. (From about 2:30 to 2:00.)"

This PanVK caching support is merged for Mesa 26.0 due out in mid-Q1.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/38019