Mesa 21.1 Wires Up Lima Shader Disk Cache

When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware.

For those with older Mali 400 Utgard GPUs in various Allwinner SoCs particularly, the Lima Gallium3D effort continues maturing. The newest feature that is complete is an on-disk shader cache.

Independent developer Vasily Khoruzhick wired up this on-disk shader cache for Lima based upon the code originally written for Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver. This on-disk shader cache for GLSL shaders with Lima should help speed up load times for games/software with large shaders and help with performance for any software otherwise attempting to re-compile shaders on the fly.

Most other Mesa drivers have long supported an on-disk shader cache while now things should all be working out fine for Lima as of this commit for next quarter's Mesa 21.1 release.