The Lima DRM/KMS Driver Is Ready For Introduction With Linux 5.2

Beyond the Lima Gallium3D driver being merged into Mesa 19.1, the Linux 5.2 kernel will be introducing the DRM/KMS kernel open-source driver developed via reverse-engineering for these Arm Mali 400/450 graphics processors.

Yesterday marked the merger of the big Lima Gallium3D driver for providing basic OpenGL support being merged into Mesa 19.1, which should be released as stable around the end of May. Last week meanwhile marked the acceptance of the Lima DRM driver into DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 5.2 merge window.

Due to being busy as always, I hadn't a chance to write about the merge, but this new "lima" DRM driver is indeed in place for the material set to land with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle. It's been a long time coming but it's finally happening, some seven years after Luc Verhaegen originally started the initiative in pushing for more open-source Arm graphics drivers.

There still is a lot of work left to do with this DRM/KMS driver (and Gallium3D code) but with Mali 400/450 once being quite common, at least there's still users around to enjoy the fruits of this work.