Lima Driver Merged Into Mesa 19.1, Providing Open-Source OpenGL For Older Mali GPUs

Seven years after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver project for open-source Mali graphics -- one of the first reverse-engineered, open-source Arm graphics driver attempts in general -- while he is no longer involved with the initiative, developer Qiang Yu picked it up and has successfully worked it into a functioning open-source OpenGL Gallium3D driver that has been merged into Mesa Git.

Overnight the Lima Gallium3D driver was merged into the Mesa code-base for this quarter's Mesa 19.1 release. Lima provides reverse-engineered driver support for the aging Mali 400/450 graphics processors. At this stage the driver is running the likes of GLMark2 or Kmscube or even the Kodi HTPC software in full-screen mode. The user-space driver is just under seventeen thousand lines of code.

It's finally been merged for anyone still interested in and using these older Mali graphics. For the past several months already in Mesa has been the maturing Panfrost Gallium3D driver for supporting the newer Arm Mali hardware.