August 3, 2026
800,000 tests and the crowd loses it
Kraid is a now a real compiler
After 800,000 wins, commenters are cheering, joking, and asking what this thing even is
TLDR: Kraid, a new open-source tool that helps Arm Mali graphics chips run code, now passes 800,000 official tests for one major graphics workload. Commenters swung from huge hype and AI dreams to total confusion about what Kraid even is, with a side of Nintendo-style boss joke chaos.
A tiny compiler project just had a main character moment: Kraid went from barely passing one test to passing all 800,000 of them for one big chunk of graphics work. That’s a huge leap for the open-source graphics world, especially for devices using Arm Mali graphics chips, which often show up in phones and other low-power gadgets. But the developer also threw in a reality check: this is not the finish line. Kraid still doesn’t handle all graphics tasks yet, and its output is intentionally a bit sloppy for now so bugs can be smoked out before the speed makeover begins.
And honestly? The comments were the real show. One stunned reader basically screamed, “800,000 test??? wow”, then instantly leaped to the million-dollar question: does this mean people can do AI work without bowing to NVIDIA? That hot take gave the thread its first burst of dream-big energy. Meanwhile, another commenter brought pure chaos with the joke that the “next step is obviously to build Ridley,” turning the whole thing into a Nintendo boss-fight meme.
But not everyone was ready to pop champagne. A confused commenter asked the question plenty of readers were probably thinking: what does Kraid actually do, and who is it for? That confusion became the mini-drama of the thread. Another person zoomed out and asked which real devices would benefit, grounding the hype in a practical reality check. So the mood was a delicious mix of awe, confusion, curiosity, and gamer-brain jokes: classic tech-comment-section energy.
Key Points
- •Kraid now passes all 800,000 Vulkan CTS tests for compute shaders in the Panfrost driver stack.
- •The compiler still does not implement vertex and fragment shader support, which remain works in progress.
- •Ekstrand says Kraid’s current code generation quality is intentionally poor in places to expose compiler bugs under register pressure.
- •The project now includes major compiler infrastructure such as SSA-based register allocation and spilling, 64-bit support, swizzle handling, copy propagation, and hardware-validated instruction semantics.
- •Future work will focus on optimization, register allocator tuning, boolean and 8-bit data handling, and completing vertex and fragment shader support.