I will test it in about 6 hours, I only have arm-stable setups in front of me at the moment.
I performed a complete system update which included updating mesa. Happily performance is good.
I then installed vulkan-mesa-layers as it was an optional. I then installed vulkan-broadcom and rebooted. All went smoothly and happy to report the following:
KDE Plasma on Wayland @ 1920x1080
1 Like
In the fkms verses kms question:
fkms
$ vblank_mode=0 glxgears
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
7659 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1531.716 FPS
8107 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1621.307 FPS
7673 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1534.511 FPS
kms
$ vblank_mode=0 glxgears
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
8329 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1665.685 FPS
8480 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1695.941 FPS
8469 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1693.430 FPS
So I am switching back to using kms even though I still get:
$ cat /proc/device-tree/soc/firmwarekms@7e600000/status
disabled
Maybe fkms = firmwarekms? So only using fkms will result in okay?
Isnāt fkms = fake kms?
Yes, āfakeā is the common term associated, but I am not sure that is the āofficialā term. So I wondered if the āfā actually means āfirmwareā. It was a rhetorical question, purely speculation on my part.
1 Like
Updated today to mesa 20.3.2 - but still not more than ~500FPS in glxgears (renderer=V3D) - no clue how others archive 1600FPS???
- unstable branch
- mainline kernel
- mesa (2.3) and mesa-git tested
- config.txt all 3 variants tested (fkms, kms, kms+pi4)
Am I missing some packages? Or is it just XFCE???
Later today I will try Manjaro-KDE.
BTW. Up to now I did not have the vulkan packages installed - but I will test this, too.
I achieve those numbers via wayland with a 1920x1080 monitor. Those numbers drop to ~400 fps with xorg on a 4k monitor and no overclocking.
Iām using also an 1080p HDMI-connected monitor but did not change any settings aroung xorg/wayland - I therefor assume that its still xorg. Can XFCE run wayland at all?
Today I tested manjaro-MATE (stable) and out of the box I got with X11 (not wayland) ~1000FPS, with KMS-Pi4 1100FPS. It seems XFCE is the culprit - it will just not do fine. I will continue testing MATE, e.g. unstable branch and various combinations of kernel + mesa but it looks promissing.
Plasma 5.20.5 now takes advantage of Vulkan and it is a very nice improvement of the user experience. Thank you @Strit
Also the compositor no longer crashes on start under xorg and I can switch between wayland and xorg without needing to reboot.
1 Like
Is there anything that needs to be manually set or will Plasma automatically just take advantage of vulkan? I have the mesa-git packaged installed because it has vulkan support, and Iām about to add the packages vulkan-broadcom and vulkan-mesa-layers. Am I missing anything?
I am no longer using mesa-git, just the standard mesa currently in unstable. If you update against arm-unstable, you wonāt need to change anything. If you are not on unstable, try commenting out the QT line in /etc/environment. I donāt recall the full name of the QT variable being set, but it is set to =software
So just need to have the vulkan-broadcom and vulkan-mesa-layers packages and comment out the QT line if itās there in /etc/environment?
Yes, that is correct. You may not need vulkan-mesa-layers, I believe it is for multiple monitor setups.
Edit: The variable to comment out is QT_QUICK_BACKEND=software
1 Like
Sorry, I missed this question previously. No, XFCE4 does not run on wayland.
Edit: I updated another from arm-stable to arm-unstable but I had to edit the /etc/environment file. So I guess it matters in what order packages are added. This time I upgraded Plasma before adding vulkan-broadcom. So I imagine the install looks for that package before modifying the fileā¦ which is good. 
I edit QT_QUICK_BACKEND=vulkanrhi, seems good.
1 Like
Man,ā¦ this was the āmissing linkā.
Now with plasma 5.20.5 everything runs smoothly and fine on top of vulkan.
vulkan-broadcom Is not required with mesa-git right?
Im getting 859fps with kms and qt environment vulkanhri
Correct. Everything is built into mesa-git.