Lima Driver Makes Progress With Shaders

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lima Driver Makes Progress With Shaders

The open-source Lima driver project that has been working on a reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver is still advancing...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMzMDg

[portets43]

Will the Lima driver leverage Gallium3D?

[e8hffff]

Another reason why we need Mir.

[dee.]

Another reason why we need Mir.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[przemoli]

Another reason why we need Mir.

Mir will use Mesa/Gallium drivers very well. Same as Wayland.

So we DO NOT need Mir for that.

And if Lima come out as superior driver to binary blob, that Canonical will use it, not the official driver.

Ofc. Mir will have a choice. Weston lack backend for android binary blobs (right now).

[e8hffff]

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Mir will solve the thousands of drivers that are yet to be reverse engineered and ported to Linux and maintained, if they will ever be so. Mir bridges the gap by using exiting maintained drivers made for Android, as you already know.

[dh04000]

Mir will solve the thousands of drivers that are yet to be reverse engineered and ported to Linux and maintained, if they will ever be so. Mir bridges the gap by using exiting maintained drivers made for Android, as you already know.

Ohhh, I see what your saying. Yes, using the existing prop. Android drivers will bring support for these devices day 1, instead of years of slow and painful dev that by the time its decent, the hardware was 3 generations ago.

[robclark]

Mir will solve the thousands of drivers that are yet to be reverse engineered and ported to Linux and maintained, if they will ever be so. Mir bridges the gap by using exiting maintained drivers made for Android, as you already know.

maybe s/solve/hack around/..

anyways, I think the arm driver situation isn't as bleak as that. There is reverse engineering work going on with nearly all of the of the embedded gpu's. Which is infinitely better than the situation a little over a year ago. I guess in 6-12months, maybe less, we are seeing working mesa drivers for lima/vivante/tegra (and there is already one for adreno). ofc, we will be playing catch-up until some of the gpu vendor's realize that it is a good idea to support the open src driver work (like intel/amd). And once the current generation gpus are supported, it will get easier for generation n+1. But the situation is improving. For example, nvidia/tegra folks working together with the community on drm/kms driver and releasing code for the 2d part. It is a baby-step, but a step nonetheless.

[dh04000]

maybe s/solve/hack around/..

anyways, I think the arm driver situation isn't as bleak as that. There is reverse engineering work going on with nearly all of the of the embedded gpu's. Which is infinitely better than the situation a little over a year ago. I guess in 6-12months, maybe less, we are seeing working mesa drivers for lima/vivante/tegra (and there is already one for adreno). ofc, we will be playing catch-up until some of the gpu vendor's realize that it is a good idea to support the open src driver work (like intel/amd). And once the current generation gpus are supported, it will get easier for generation n+1. But the situation is improving. For example, nvidia/tegra folks working together with the community on drm/kms driver and releasing code for the 2d part. It is a baby-step, but a step nonetheless.

Most of these drivers are only capable of displaying basic graphics. Do any of these even run a full desktop yet?

[robclark]

Most of these drivers are only capable of displaying basic graphics. Do any of these even run a full desktop yet?

http://bloggingthemonkey.blogspot.co...freedreno.html

thanks to gallium, that is with gl/glx, which the proprietary driver can't even do.

Most of the others are still in more of a research phase, rather than actual gl driver. But at least two of them (vivante and lima) have figured out enough of the workings of the GPU to actually start on gl driver, so I think you'll start to see a lot more visible progress in the coming months.