The Lima Gallium3D Driver Is Aiming To Be Merged In Mesa

While there is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that has been advancing rapidly within mainline Mesa for Arm's Mali newer Midgard/Bifrost architectures, the Lima driver might finally see the light of day in mainline Mesa for Mali's older 400/450 series graphics engine.

Lima is the open-source driver effort originally started seven years ago Luc Verhaegen but then the project ceased and more recently Qiang Yu has been working on resurrecting and advancing this original open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali graphics driver effort.

The Lima Gallium3D driver in its current form for Mali 400/450 hardware can run basic applications like GLMark2 and Kmscube and even single-full screen apps like Kodi atop GBM.

Qiang Yu is now seeking to merge this driver into mainline Mesa. In its current form is more than seventeen thousand lines of code.

Concurrently, Qiang Yu is also working to mainline the Lima DRM kernel driver for open-source Arm Mali support in kernel-space for the older Arm SoCs sporting these graphics.