[ARM Stable Update] 2021-01-21 - Plasma 5.20.5, Mesa 20.3.3, Mobile and Kernels

I’ve just upgraded my PinebookPro : everything went fine! I also swtich from linux-pinebookpro to linux (5.10-7), and USB-C charging + hub work again!

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Here is how it looks on the external display with both current Mesa and Mesa-git…!

image|666x500

That’s pretty bad.

I haven’t seen any of these with SDDM, Lightdm, XFCE, MATE or Plasma. These are the ones I have tested on newer kernels.

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Seems to be a Wayland issue… just flashed a fresh build of Mate desktop on microSD and it runs without issues on the external display…

Likely. I don’t use Wayland on the Pinebook Pro yet.

Hmmm created a fresh GNOME image and removed the panfrost entry from blacklist … started a Wayland session and et viola

EDIT: maybe I’ll have to check the env variables in /etc/profile.d in Sway edition

Ok, gave it a run of tests with different global env. Also installed cage as alternative for the gtkgreeter and weston to verify if it’s a sway issue, but results are always the same…

AFAIK all of them are based on wlroots, so I guess it could be an issue with that base lib…

EDIT: opened a bug ticket on GitHub…

@Strit after the first round of discussion with the maintainers of sway/wlroots on GH… do you have an idea if there is anything specially enabled with the combination of kernel 5.10.x and Mesa 2.3.x on the Pinebook Pro?

It’s hard to really tell what might cause the issue as kernel 5.4.x and current Mesa are working fine on the same setup…

Only thing new, would be the OpenGL 3.1 support in Panfrost from mesa 20.3.

So I guessed as well, but isn’t that also available on the older kernel?

Looks like it’s something related to wlroots and latest mesa driver… see this comment: Visual glitches with external display on Pinebook Pro · Issue #2683 · swaywm/wlroots · GitHub.

After setting this flag in /etc/environment the second display is working properly with the newest kernel / mesa \o/

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I looked a bit deeper and figured that the drm renderer in wlroots is using some kernel func to read the capability for ADDFB2_MODIFIERS (wlroots/drm.c at 04d89a8bc5c5b0db0ae24ca3e2b35f5632ed6d23 · swaywm/wlroots · GitHub) in case we haven’t set the newly introduced env variable.

So eventually the newer kernel is responding with this capability available, whereas Mesa doesn’t support it on panfrost yet. In this case it might hint at a bug in the kernel patch used to enable hdmi out on recent kernel versions, but I haven’t been able to check the patch to verify it.

@Strit can you eventually forward this to the maintainer of the kernel patch please?

RPi4, 4GB, xfce
With the update I lost the xfce power manager icon in the status tray
Not a big issue…

XFCE 4.16 changed the Icon Theme, and by extension also the way it displays the power management icon. It’s a known issue the XFCE team is aware of.

Shouldn’t it be done to the Panfrost devs instead?
The only thing the kernel patches does, is enable USB-C video support.
Can you see if it’s better on kernel 5.11-rc?

Hmmm would like to but at the moment my device went completely blank :open_mouth:

Initially I figured some issues with the 5.10 kernel when writing the sway image to microSD, which always broke after the first 1.7GB have been written regardless of the size of the microSD in use. So I went back to the original pinebook-pro kernel (5.7) on my main OS. Afterwards I was able to dd the image to microSD successfully again.

Restarted the system again to boot into the installer on the microSD and did the initial setup of the system on the microSD. After resizing the partition it initiated the reboot and it never went online again…

My hope is that it’s low on power (as it was charged via USB-C earlier and we have had some problems with USB-C charging in newer kernels in the past), so I removed it from the docking station and use the barrel power plug for now…

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Hmmm with the barrel power plugged in the red led beside it always went off after about a minute, which from pine64 wiki should mean battery full…

…still no reaction on power on button…

Any quick tip?

Ok, removing the backplate and pressing the RESET button on the mainboard does the trick… reflashing to microSD right now…

With kernel 5.11.0-rc3 the issue still persists… my guess on the kernel patch was triggered on the investigation that the same Mesa version is working on kernel 5.7, but not on 5.10 or 5.11.

Will go with the 5.7 kernel on my main OS for now.

Will, the linux-pinebookpro kernel is doing just about the same, as the patches do on 5.10/5.11. I can’t rule it out though, but it seems unlikely for me. Seems more likely it’s one of the many many panfrost updates that have been added to the kernel since 5.7.

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