Lima Gallium3D Picks Up A Buffer Object Cache, Partial Updates

The Lima Gallium3D driver for supporting Arm Mali 400/450 graphics hardware within Arm SoCs has picked up a few performance optimizations.

Vasily Khoruzhick has contributed a buffer object cache to this Gallium3D driver to avoid the great overhead costs to allocating buffer objects. The BO cache for Lima is modeled after the Broadcom V3D Gallium3D driver's BO cache.

Lead Lima driver developer Qiang Yu carried out a different optimization for Mesa 19.3 overnight and that was landing EGL_KHR_partial_update support. KHR_partial_update is used for handling partial updates to surfaces to avoid having to deal with areas of the surface that are unchanged between frames. In doing so, there is obvious efficiency improvements.

These Lima improvements and more will be part of the Mesa 19.3 release due out in December.