Orange Pi 5 Support Nears The Mainline Linux Kernel

[AlanSMac]

Thank god and finally. Despite allegations that "rk3588 works "perfectly" on rockchip vendor kernel 5.10 right now" -- unless you're running some fisher-price Ubuntu distro with a limited use case, it does not. Vulkan support for the Mali G610 is all swrast/llvmpipe/panfork hacks that don't work in a performant manner with Wayland window managers, so you're stuck with some outdated x11 setup that is circling the drain.

Being able to use mainline with the Opi-5B will hopefully put more focus on getting better support for a mainline Mali G610 driver, since the closed-source firmware is an outdated mess, and PanFork seems to be more of a proof-of-concept than something that leverages all the various hardware acceleration features of the G610.

It seems like the folks at collabora are working on a more performant implementation with PanCSF, that will have G610 support. It would also be neat if I could use rockchip's MPP/hardware codecs with VDPAU/VAAPI via zink, but I can dream on I guess.

Are you speaking from first hand experience with Panfork? I've been tempted to buy an Orange Pi 5 Pro but it's the Panfork G610 stuff that was putting me off. But I've been wanting to for months and I noticed the Panfork repo said you probably shouldn't use this as most fixes have been merged back to mainline Mesa. So just curious from those with first hand experience if it's easy or a pain to get hardware acceleration and if it now performs ok. Thanks

[AlanSMac]

Orange PI 5 is pretty good for a low-power desktop, still very powerfull, I was using it when my PC broke. But in my opinion it gets very hot in their own orangepi branded aluminium case after watching some youtube, can't even hold it in my hands.

Is it that with a fan as well or just the case?