The Lima Gallium3D Driver Is Aiming To Be Merged In Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 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...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lima-Mesa-Driver-Mainline-RFC

[nokipaike]

I can't wait to try some distro on my rockchip-based 3229 tvbox with mali 450 gpu

[Terrablit]

I'm pretty excited for the opportunity to get old ARM devices onto a newer kernel. Mali 400/450 GPUs were extremely popular with vendors for a while. TV boxes and Android HDMI sticks usually had Mali GPUs in them, as did many of the Allwinner SoCs. That happened less as Freedreno and Vivante left Lima in the dust. Now with a mesa driver we might see decent support for that older, cheap hardware.

Qiang Yu says it's "not ready for daily usage" yet, so even if it merges, it won't make a difference to end users until Q3 or later probably. But just having something ready to merge into Mesa is a huge step forward. It'll help keep the codebase in sync with the rest of the project, attract more contributions, and take advantage of mesa tooling and infrastructure.

[Terrablit]

That's not to say that you couldn't get more recent builds using vendor initiatives, but they always lag behind. It's much nicer when the drivers can be built and shipped with the distro.

[tuxd3v]

I can't wait to try some distro on my rockchip-based 3229 tvbox with mali 450 gpu

I second that, with some of my sbcs relying on mali 450