A change upstreamed to Mesa by an Arm engineer now enables the Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics to work with the Rusticl driver by default.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has worked with the Rusticl OpenCL Rust driver already but to date has required setting the RUSTICL_ENABLE=panfrost environment variable for actually enabling the support, similar to other drivers where the Rusticl support has not been fully vetted and made official. But with the latest code for Mesa 26.2, Panfrost is being enabled for Rusticl by default to avoid the need for that override.

Arm engineer Ahmed Hesham made the change to now enable Panfrost by default for this better out-of-the-box experience for those wanting to use modern, open-source OpenCL on Arm Mali graphics hardware.

Mesa 26.2 stable is due out in August.