As a follow-up to the article last week about [1]KRAID as a new compiler for modern Arm Mali graphics , that initial code has now been merged to Mesa 26.2 for benefiting the Panfrost and PanVK open-source drivers.

Faith Ekstrand of Collabora has been spearheading the effort on KRAID as this new graphics shader compiler for Arm Mali v9 "Valhall" and newer Mali graphics. KRAID is inspired by the NAK compiler from the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver in Mesa.

While still in its early stages, it should ultimately be a much better compiler for modern Arm Mali graphics archirectures than their old Bifrost compiler. There are many new features supported and it's written in the Rust programming language.

KRAID isn't yet ready for end-users but has passed its first dEQP test and will now begin to be developed within the Mesa tree to ease the development burden. Building KRAID requires the "-Dpanfrost-rust" Meson build option as well as the "PAN_USE_KRAID" environment variable being set.

Those wanting to learn more about this initial now-merged compiler code can find it on [2]GitHub . It will be interesting to see how the KRAID compiler matures over the coming months.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Arm-Mali-KRAID

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/41841