Tutorial Enable Lima on headless devices

gamelaster · July 8, 2020

On some devices (mostly headless) like Pine A64 LTS and other SBCs with Allwinner SoCs is Lima blacklisted by default or not supported by distribution.

For getting Lima work, you need to use distribution, which have already Mesa with Lima support (Mesa 20.1+) (or compile latest Mesa from sources, but this is not included in this tutorial).

At the moment of writing, it's Ubuntu Focal and Debian Bullseye. I personally prefer Debian more, so in my case, download Debian Bullseye image for your SBC and burn it into the board.

After booting into your board, find file named /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-NAMEOFYOURSBC.conf (for me it's blacklist-pinea64-lts.conf),

find line with:

blacklist lima

and comment it by adding # at begin of this line, so it will look like this:

# blacklist lima

Reboot the device and Lima should work finely.

If you will have any questions or issues, let me know

- gamiee

Igor · July 8, 2020

We are having a slightly different approach. Lima is enabled, but acceleration is disabled where broken - on Bionic for example. On Focal / Bullseye it works, yeah.

For headless devices, its blacklisted with a build config:
https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/config/boards/nanopiair.conf#L6

Tnx for the tip.

Cheers!

Werner · July 10, 2020

On 7/8/2020 at 10:17 PM, gamelaster said:

At the moment of writing, it's only Debian Bullseye.

For other distributions you can always install mesa from source. Also there is a PPA from oibaf which though does not seem to cut it with its the prebuild debs. Had more success with doing the first variant.