Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

Posted Feb 10, 2012 1:46 UTC (Fri) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

This bodes well for the openness of the Spark Tablet.

http://lwn.net/Articles/477949/

Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

Posted Feb 10, 2012 3:18 UTC (Fri) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

Also for Allwinner A10 devices.

Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

Posted Feb 10, 2012 13:45 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (3 responses)

indeed; we're very happy that this is all coming together. there is a growing number of open device projects and together we'll be able to bring software freedom to mobile devices just as we (as a global community of volunteers, companies and organizations) did for servers and desktops.

what's really exciting is that if we work together we have the opportunity of creating something that is highly relevant in the market globally, not only to ourselves :)

i am really looking forward to this driver maturing further and am in communication with Luc ... viva la freedom :)

Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:17 UTC (Fri) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (2 responses)

One of the header files (compiler.h) references a libMali.so ( for shader compiler) which does not appear to be built.
Does it mean that some closed source component is still needed to access 3D drawing features (or that I should do my homework better before asking questions)?

Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

Posted Feb 10, 2012 18:45 UTC (Fri) by CopperWing (guest, #82856) [Link]

I think the code currently published is just the basic infrastructure required to reset the GPU and send graphics command lists to the HW via IOCTLs. The part responsible for translating OpenGL APIs into those commands lists is still missing/unpublished.

Right now this is only good enough to playback commands lists "captured" from the ARM's proprietary driver output. Probably after reverse engineering the meaning of the command lists, hooking this code with Mesa will provide the missing parts.

Lima driver code for the Mali GPU released

Posted Feb 10, 2012 19:34 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Correct. The current driver treats the shader compiler as a black box and re-uses that in the free driver. So what we have now is free driver infrastructure with a binary shader compiler. One thing at a time.

The infrastructure part is much less contentious in terms of patent issues, and lets other people get involved so it makes sense to start with this part.

The clean design (and lack of years of accumulated cruft) in Mali means that it is easy to separate these two parts. They are more-or-less independent reverse-engineering tasks, as I understand it.