drm-shim — The Mesa 3D Graphics Library latest documentation

# drm-shim

Panfrost implements `drm-shim`, stubbing out the Panfrost kernel interface. Use cases for this functionality include:

- Future hardware bring up

- Running shader-db on non-Mali workstations

- Reproducing compiler (and some driver) bugs without Mali hardware

Although Mali hardware is usually paired with an Arm CPU, Panfrost is portable C code and should work on any Linux machine. In particular, you can test the compiler on shader-db on an Intel desktop.

To build Mesa with Panfrost drm-shim, configure Meson with `-Dgallium-drivers=panfrost` and `-Dtools=drm-shim`. See the above building section for a full invocation. The drm-shim binary will be built to `build/src/panfrost/drm-shim/libpanfrost_noop_drm_shim.so`.

To use, set the `LD_PRELOAD` environment variable to the drm-shim binary.

By default, drm-shim mocks a Mali-G52 system. To select a specific Mali GPU, set the `PAN_GPU_ID` environment variable to the desired GPU ID:

Product | Architecture | GPU ID
--- | --- | ---
Mali-T720 | Midgard (v4) | 720
Mali-T860 | Midgard (v5) | 860
Mali-G72 | Bifrost (v6) | 6221
Mali-G52 | Bifrost (v7) | 7212
Mali-G57 | Valhall (v9) | 9093
Mali-G610 | Valhall (v10) | a867

Additional GPU IDs are enumerated in the `panfrost_model_list` list in `src/panfrost/lib/pan_props.c`.

As an example: assuming Mesa is installed to a local path `~/lib` and Mesa’s build directory is `~/mesa/build`, a shader can be compiled for Mali-G52 as:

    ~/shader-db$ BIFROST_MESA_DEBUG=shaders \
    LD_PRELOAD=~/mesa/build/src/panfrost/drm-shim/libpanfrost_noop_drm_shim.so \
    PAN_GPU_ID=7212 \
    ./run shaders/glmark/1-1.shader_test

The same shader can be compiled for Mali-T720 as:

    ~/shader-db$ MIDGARD_MESA_DEBUG=shaders \
    LD_PRELOAD=~/mesa/build/src/panfrost/drm-shim/libpanfrost_noop_drm_shim.so \
    PAN_GPU_ID=720 \
    ./run shaders/glmark/1-1.shader_test

These examples set the compilers’ `shaders` debug flags to dump the optimized NIR, backend IR after instruction selection, backend IR after register allocation and scheduling, and a disassembly of the final compiled binary.

As another example, this invocation runs a single dEQP test “on” Mali-G52, pretty-printing GPU data structures and disassembling all shaders (`PAN_MESA_DEBUG=trace`) as well as dumping raw GPU memory (`PAN_MESA_DEBUG=dump`). The `EGL_PLATFORM=surfaceless` environment variable and various flags to dEQP mimic the surfaceless environment that our continuous integration (CI) uses. This eliminates window system dependencies, although it requires a specially built CTS:

    ~/VK-GL-CTS/build/external/openglcts/modules$ PAN_MESA_DEBUG=trace,dump \
    LD_PRELOAD=~/mesa/build/src/panfrost/drm-shim/libpanfrost_noop_drm_shim.so \
    PAN_GPU_ID=7212 EGL_PLATFORM=surfaceless \
    ./glcts --deqp-surface-type=pbuffer \
    --deqp-gl-config-name=rgba8888d24s8ms0 --deqp-surface-width=256 \
    --deqp-surface-height=256 -n \
    dEQP-GLES31.functional.shaders.builtin_functions.common.abs.float_highp_compute