ARM: This Open-Source Stack Will Only Grow Louder

Luc Verhaegen has warned ARM that his Lima graphics driver project will only "grow louder and louder" as its performance becomes more competitive with their closed-source Mali graphics driver and eventually may reach (or surpass) feature parity.

One week after showing off that the Lima Graphics Driver Can Beat ARM's Binary Blob as part of the FOSDEM 2013 coverage, Verhaegen has a new blog post talking about the availability of his Quake 3: Arena code, work on the Lima driver's shader compiler, and other forthcoming features. Luc also issued a warning to ARM Holdings about his Lima driver:

We are not going away, we are here to stay. We cannot be silenced or stopped anymore, and we are becoming harder and harder to ignore.

It is only a matter of time before we produce an open source graphics driver stack which rivals your binary in performance. And that time is measured in weeks and months now. The requests from your own customers, for support for this open source stack, will only grow louder and louder.

So please, stop fighting us. Embrace us. Work with us. Your customers and shareholders will love you for it.

At the moment though this open-source driver project isn't in the usable form of a Mesa / Gallium3D driver as most end-users would expect and they are still (for the moment) using ARM's biary shader compiler, but they lots of advancements planned for this open-source ARM Mali Linux graphics driver.

Luc's post can be read on his blog. And be sure to see more of what happened at FOSDEM.