Lima: An open source graphics driver for ARM Mali GPUs
Lima is an open source graphics driver which supports Mali-200 and Mali-400 GPUs.
The aim of this driver is to finally bring all the advantages of open source software to ARM SoC graphics drivers. Currently, the sole availability of binary drivers is increasing development and maintenance overhead, while also reducing portability, compatibility and limiting choice. Anyone who has dealt with GPU support on ARM, be it for a linux with a GNU stack, or for an android, knows the pain of dealing with these binaries. Lima is going to solve this for you, but some time is needed still to get there.
News
- 2012-04-14: Rob Clark announces the freedreno project inspired by the Lima approach
- 2012-04-12: Libv is confirmed to talk about Lima progress at LinuxTag on May 26
- 2012-04-12: Fragment (pixel) shader disassembler announced at Phoronix
- 2012-02-12: Video of the android demo is up at Phoronix
- 2012-02-09: Lima repository created and current code pushed up to our gitorious project.
- 2012-02-04: Lima driver talk at FOSDEM: Loads of fun! Video up soon!
- 2012-02-03: First public renders of smoothed triangle, smoothed strip, smoothed fan, flat quad, triangle quad, smoothed lighted rotated cube
- 2012-01-24: A new name has been chosen for the project: remali now becomes Lima! We now have a gitorious project, there is the #lima channel on freenode. A mailing list will be created soon.
- 2012-01-23: Codethink puts out a press release for the business world. This is definitely not vaporware!
- 2012-01-21: Talk appears on the FOSDEM schedule.The cat is out of the bag! Story published by phoronix, hits slashdot, golem, pro-linux and tweakers.
Software
All lima code is kept at our gitorious project.
Documentation for the shader compiler, and the initial investigation of the instruction set is available here.
Hardware
Mali-400:
Mali-200:
Contribute
The Lima driver currently only has some preliminary and highly experimental support. This experimental phase is necessary to gain a full and complete understanding of how the Mali GPUs work. Once more is known, an actual graphics driver (most likely based off of Mesa/Gallium) can be written. There is a lot of interesting work that still needs to be done!
If you would like to contribute to this project, and would like to know what Devices can be used to help develop the Lima driver, check out the requirements. Rest assured though, due to the enormous popularity of Android on cheap tablets, contributing to a free graphics driver has never been this cheap and portable at the same time!
Contact
We can currently be reached on irc on freenode, in the #lima channel.
Please subscribe to our mailinglist
The Lima driver is sponsored by 