ARM Mali 400/500 DRM Driver Volleyed Out Again, Trying To Get Into The Mainline Kernel

The open-source ARM Mali space certainly seems to be heating up this year... The Panfrost Gallium3D driver was just merged to mainline Mesa days ago as developers work on bringing up an open-source 3D stack for the Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics processors. For those with older Mali 400/500 series hardware, the separate Lima-revived effort has sent out their latest patch series for trying to get their DRM driver into the kernel.

Longtime open-source graphics driver developer Luc Verhaegen developed the Lima driver initially a number of years ago for the original Mali reverse-engineering work. He has since ceased working on the Lima driver but Qiang Yu has been trying to nurse and extend this code for inclusion into mainline as well as extending it and building out a Mesa driver too.

Qiang Yu today sent out the second version of this Lima DRM driver and he feels it's ready for inclusion into the upstream Linux kernel with the user-space interface being stable.

This latest version of the patches following his original "request for comments" can now be found on the dri-devel list. We'll see if it gets accepted into staging for the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle coming up in a few weeks.

Qiang continues to work on the out-of-tree Lima Mesa driver, which he says isn't yet ready for daily usage but can run simple tests like the KMS cube and glmark2. That Mesa driver is being developed here, again for the Mali 400/500 series prior to the scope of the Panfrost effort.