A New Mali-400 Open-Source Graphics Driver Is In Development

An open-source contributor has begun working on a new open-source driver for the ARM Mali-400 GPU.

Qiang Yu, who appears to still works for AMD, has begun working on an open-source Mali-400 graphics driver. So far this Mesa Gallium3D driver can run a simple OpenGL triangle draw application while he's now working on the shader compiler bits.

This new Mali-400 Gallium3D driver isn't based directly on the past work of Luc Verhaegen's Lima driver but is reusing the hardware information learned from the past efforts and its hilbert render curve algorithm. This new driver consists of the Gallium3D driver, the libdrm support, and a new kernel DRM driver.

This new driver was announced a few days ago on the Lima IRC channel. This Mali-400 OpenGL driver in development can be found via GitHub. It will be interesting to see where this new Mali-400 open-source driver leads and if it ends up advancing enough by this developer to eventually see it mainlined in the future.