Panfrost for Bifrost GPUs - Big improvements

Yes odroid n2 post in their forum is using arm blob gpu and vpu drivers and not panfrost and amlvpu which mesa and kernel developers are working on.

It is good to see you helping Manjaro team in testing different hardwares while also helping other manjaro users with their device support.

Much appreciated.
I will test on my vim3l soon.

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O.K. I must have missed this because they talked about accelerated video playback in the ‘Panfrost Status on Odroid N2’ thread. Thanks for clearing this up.

Thank you so much for these kind words!

That’s gonna be an interesting comparison. Should more or less perform the same due to Mali G31 and I guess that the S905D3 is not too different to the S905X3.

I am on the unstable branch now with 5.9.6-1-MANJARO-ARM kernel and mesa-git package. So far, everythings is up and running and stable. I am typing this using my TV box.

While supertuxkart works perfectly, Cendric and Retux do not start up and OpenArena loads but then has massive problems because only the left top quarter of the screen is rendered. Cross-checked with ‘mesa-arm-git’ package from archlinuxdroid.tk repo but same problems here. So there still seem to be some glitches between mesa and new kernel.

Anyway, I think that we just have to wait a little longer before everything matures and is more suitable for daily use. All in all it’s a big step forward!

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Today I have built an tried OpenArena, Xonotic and SuperTuxKart. Xonotic doesn’t launch at all, but the others launch and play just fine, except for a few graphical glitches in SuperTuxKart. :slight_smile:

Great news!

I’m going to install KDE Plasma as well tomorrow and have a look if the archlinuxdroid.tk version of OpenArena will work on my machine with KDE (just for testing - I am actually not really into shooter games).

I guess you will add your build of OpenArena to the official repo as well (if you did not already do so; I’m currently on my iPad so cannot easily check for that)?

No. Adding games to the repo, will make it grow rapidly and out of control in no time. But I did make a custom repo for the games.

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Thanks for creating the games repo and the information about it!

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Playing with dtbs has no result for my box, but I’ve realized that in manjaro 20.06 panfrost was up and that updating from kernel 5.7 to 5.9 killed my gpu. Future with 5.10 will be hard also because I don’t expect my dtb working there.

What box are you using?

A95x F2 that boots with meson-g12a-u200. dtb and vim3 image.

Why do you expect it not to work? Does 5.10 introduce something that is suspected to break it? People at the Odroid forum report that 5.10rc is running on the N2.

I’ve read 5.10 is a big change for arm, and aml sbc is not in the list of future works for Linux because this company does not help at all.

Odroid seems to have its own boot.

I read balbes saying that aml is not supportive and that was the reason for him to quit Armbian support for aml. I did not know that other people are quitting aml support as well. Would be too bad!

This is true but that doesn’t mean aml will not be supported, baylibre team is working for amlogic boards only so they will be supporting the devices upstream.

Yes it does not boot with the old method as text offset patch was remove which makes the device not boot at all but I have asked in the mailing list for the alternative and they said we can still make it to boot using legacy linux boot method which we still have to try while it does boot fine for libreelec so all is good at upstream level nothing to worry about.

Yes he is not supporting the new devices but he still supports the existing devices that he have. He is a good man and he will do good to the community by supporting those devices which he have atleast.

I don’t think amlogic device will be dropped completely coz there is a huge opportunity for linux distro on amlogic boards even though amlogic doesn’t help but I think they have third party contributors so that is indirectly the same thing as supporting directly.

Let’s hope for the best for all Linux community.

Latest Armbian TV has not amlogic entry in extlinux

Mesa-Git is now at 21.0.0 in unstable branch.
Running it now on my Odroid N2 and it’s doing fairly well. I can play SuperTuxKart at about 10-14 FPS, which is not bad for such an early version of the driver.

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Installing kernel 5.9.6 has made panfrost come back. Problem is that mesa-git has broken glx and have not glxinfo to know. Inxy - G gives panfrost driver, but I’m not sure about it.

Sounds like you are using mesa-git from testing branch. The current one in testing branch is broken yes.
The one in Unstable branch works.

I have install stable linux kernel 5.9.6-1 and mesa 20.2.1-1 is pre-installed on Beelink GT King Pro. “glxinfo -B”

jfl@GTKPro ~]$ glxinfo -B
bash: glxinfo: command not found

Was trying to check whether Panfrost is working. With linux kernel 5.9.6 and and mesa 20.2.1-1 installed is there any else need to be done or installed to enable Panfrost?

Also wanted to improve Firefox Video playback support. Thank you.

Install mesa-demos to get info about GPU drivers with glxinfo commands.

Is the Beelink GT King Pro rk3399 based or G12B based?
If it’s rkk3399 based, the kernel and mesa you have installed has support for Panfrost on your GPU.
If it’s G12B based, you need to switch out mesa with mesa-git to get Panfrost activated, but it does not yet support Plasma acceleration.