--- title: A Panfrost milestone | daily.dev description: Collabora has achieved a significant milestone with the Panfrost open source driver for ARM Mali GPUs: it now supports running Wayland compositors and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: A Panfrost milestone | daily.dev og:description: Collabora has achieved a significant milestone with the Panfrost open source driver for ARM Mali GPUs: it now supports running Wayland compositors and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XyanITSMI.png og:image:alt: A Panfrost milestone og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A Panfrost milestone **[Collabora Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/collabora)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Collabora has achieved a significant milestone with the Panfrost open source driver for ARM Mali GPUs: it now supports running Wayland compositors and zero-copy GPU-accelerated clients. Previously, Panfrost relied on a hacky X11 SHM buffer copy approach that limited testing and invalidated performance analysis. The new winsys abstraction using ARM's kernel driver enables proper buffer creation, export, and import via GBM, allowing applications like kmscube, glmark2, Kodi, and the Weston compositor to run. This improvement provides a better foundation for rendering work and allows parallel progress on a proper DRM driver in the mainline kernel. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is Panfrost and what hardware does it support? Panfrost is a free and open source GPU driver for the ARM Mali family of GPUs. It targets newer Mali variants — for example, the Mali T-864 found in the RK3399 SoC on the NanoPC-T4. It is developed as part of the Mesa graphics stack and aims to provide the same open driver ecosystem that already exists for Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Vivante GPUs. _Developers working on embedded ARM Linux platforms track Panfrost driver progress on daily.dev._ ### How does Panfrost handle buffer sharing between the GPU and display on Wayland? Panfrost implements a winsys abstraction that uses ARM's kernel driver to properly create, export, and import buffers via GBM. This replaces an earlier hack that copied each frame into an X11 SHM buffer. The result supports running GBM-based applications — including kmscube, glmark2, Kodi, and the Weston compositor — as well as zero-copy display of GPU-rendered Wayland clients in Weston. _Engineers integrating open GPU drivers into embedded Wayland stacks follow developments like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Mesa's Rusticl Now Enables Arm Mali Panfrost Driver Support By Default](https://daily.dev/posts/mesa-s-rusticl-now-enables-arm-mali-panfrost-driver-support-by-default-itpmna5qe) · Phoronix · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Prominent Mesa Developer Now Working For Arm On PanVK & Panfrost Code](https://daily.dev/posts/prominent-mesa-developer-now-working-for-arm-on-panvk-panfrost-code-xsqflqtlc) · Phoronix · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [PanVK Mali Vulkan Driver Lands In-Memory Cache & On-Disk Shader Cache Support](https://daily.dev/posts/panvk-mali-vulkan-driver-lands-in-memory-cache-on-disk-shader-cache-support-y2z1wbliv) · Phoronix · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#mesa](https://daily.dev/tags/mesa) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"A Panfrost milestone","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi"},"datePublished":"2026-08-11T08:55:48.738Z","dateModified":"2026-08-11T09:29:07.572Z","description":"Collabora has achieved a significant milestone with the Panfrost open source driver for ARM Mali GPUs: it now supports running Wayland compositors and...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/5778dd9e21c88d411da5a99a4e751fe2?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/5778dd9e21c88d411da5a99a4e751fe2?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Collabora Blog","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Collabora Blog","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--ZGZ0FjqS--/f_auto,q_auto/v1786438306/logos/collabora?_a=BAMAMicg0","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/collabora"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"linux,mesa","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Collabora Blog","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/collabora"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"A Panfrost milestone"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-panfrost-milestone-xyanitsmi#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What is Panfrost and what hardware does it support?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Panfrost is a free and open source GPU driver for the ARM Mali family of GPUs. 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