iter9 of the panvk-bifrost campaign — operator-confirmed Vulkan output
on PineTab2 (Mali-G52 r1 MC1) 2026-05-20.
Patches Mesa 26.0.6's PanVk Vulkan driver:
- VK_KHR/EXT_robustness2 + nullDescriptor exposed for PAN_ARCH 6/7
- has_vk1_1 / has_vk1_2 = true on Bifrost
Patches applied via sed in PKGBUILD prepare() (cleaner than maintaining
a Mesa fork for two two-line tweaks; upstream context drifts between
Mesa releases would make a literal .patch brittle).
Co-installs at /usr/lib/panvk-bifrost/ — stock mesa untouched. Stock
libvulkan_panfrost.so and its ICD JSON keep working for everyone not
opting into the patched driver.
Ships /usr/bin/brave-vulkan that wires up:
VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/lib/panvk-bifrost/icd.json
PAN_I_WANT_A_BROKEN_VULKAN_DRIVER=1
MESA_VK_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.2 # ANGLE needs apiVersion>=1.1; the
# has_vk1_x flags don't move it, so
# the env-var override carries that
brave --use-gl=disabled --enable-features=Vulkan --use-vulkan=native
--ozone-platform=x11 --no-sandbox --disable-gpu-sandbox
--ignore-gpu-blocklist "$@"
Side-steps the stock "GLES3 is unsupported / GPU process exits" failure
documented in panvk-bifrost/README's "Consumer-side benefit" section.
Known limitation: WebGL/WebGL2 in-page won't work — ANGLE needs GLES3
which needs VK_EXT_transform_feedback, which PanVk-Bifrost doesn't
currently support. Browser chrome + standard page rendering work fine.
Gitea Actions job mesa-panvk-bifrost-aarch64 added to build.yml,
patterned on libva-v4l2-request-fourier-aarch64. Mesa build is slow
(~30-60min on actrunner-aarch64). Standalone (no needs:),
continue-on-error so it doesn't block other jobs.
Campaign artifacts: ~/src/panvk-bifrost/{README.md, phase8_iteration9_close.md,
phase0_evidence/iter9_brave_vulkan_breakthrough.txt}.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
marfrit
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