Codethink Senior Engineer Launches Open Source 3D Device Driver Project

Feb. 6, 2012 - PRLog -- Codethink Limited, a provider of engineering services for mobile and embedded devices, praises the accomplishments of the Lima Driver Project, a free and open source project started by Codethink’s senior 3D graphics engineer, Luc Verhaegen.  

The project aims to bring together a community of liked-minded talented system and graphics engineers.  This new community project anticipates helping embedded and mobile device manufacturers and their ecosystem partners and customers such as mobile application/solution developers, telecommunications operators, enterprises creating their own custom system images for consumer devices.
Accomplishment and Methodology

The initial driver precursor, Limare, will commence by slowly building-up knowledge of the ARM Ltd Mali graphics processing unit (GPU).    An initial, single frame EGL/openGLES2 application was written which targets specific functionality of the GPU.  Following that the command stream rendering a single frame was captured and analyzed.  Using the same input data as the EGL/openGLES application (shader source, attributes and uniforms), the Limare infrastructure is expanded or improved until it shows the same render.

The following images were rendered and can be found in full on the project website, www.limadriver.org:

1) smoothed triangle.
2) smoothed strip.
3) smoothed fan.
4) flat quad.
5) triangle quad.
6) smoothed, lighted, rotated cube.

Luc Verhaegen said, “These renders are taken from a Mali-400, and they produce the exact same result on a Mali-200, albeit ever so slightly slower. They are 4x MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing), as the bits to enable this are known already. The images are upside down, as that is the way that the panels are laid out on initial test Mali devices.  The backgrounds are grey as that is the easiest way to tell whether we still have a cleared frame buffer, or whether something went catastrophically wrong and we only rendered black.”

Engineers wishing to participate can learn more at www.limadriver.org.   For real-time communications interested persons can use the IRC channel, #lima, on freenode.  In the near future, the source can be found on the git repositories at https://gitorious.org/lima.

About Codethink Ltd.

Founded in 2007, Codethink, provides software development and consultancy services staffed with some of the embedded and Linux open source communities’ best engineers.  While headquartered in Manchester UK, team members work on projects in many of the mobile and embedded device global hotspots, including Asia, Northern Europe and North America.

Customers range from innovative startups to household names - they turn to Codethink for specific expertise, difficult projects, or to help them meet deadlines.  Codethink’s engineers help clients achieve their technical applications and system software goals - where complexity, technology constraints or project deadlines drive a need for exceptional software engineering.

Codethink’s team have helped deliver software for hundreds of organisations, on thousands of projects, for many millions of devices.  
Find out more about Codethink at www.codethink.co.uk or send an email to sales@codethink.co.uk.

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Codethink provides software development and consultancy services with particular expertise in Linux systems, the Linux kernel as well as mobile and embedded systems.