ASpeed AST2600 Support Coming To The Linux 5.4 Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASpeed AST2600 Support Coming To The Linux 5.4 Kernel

While not officially released yet, support for the ASpeed AST2600 is coming to the Linux 5.4 kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASpeed-AST2600-Linux-5.4-Coming

[DanaG]

I wish the ASPEED KMS driver (and the comparable one for Matrox BMCs) at least supported page-flipping.
It breaks all sorts of things when you try to use Wayland and one device can't even do page flipping or double buffering.
Can't DRI_PRIME offload from a primary ASPEED (or Matrox) to a secondary Radeon!

[starshipeleven]

why they can not put the full RISC-V-GPU inside the "ASpeed AST2600" ?

because this device does not need 3D capability at all.

but why not put real GPU hardware inside of the ASpeed AST2600 ?

Because this hardware is a remote-management interface for a server. You don't usually need more than 2D for that.

[starshipeleven]

I think you need (Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)) and 3D capability to use the hardware in Qemu/KMS virtual machines because do the same calculations with the cpu gives you a big performance penalty.

for the second time: This is NOT hardware that needs 3D support.
It's hardware that is supposed to provide KVM-over-IP and remote management functionality.

If you need 3D capability, install a PCIe graphics card.

and as you can see the other forum member who writes here also thinks you need more functionality:

He didn't ask nonsense like 3D capability, although I still find debatable his issue.

i am sure there is a market for a open-source GPU with 3D capability and SR-IOV

You are wrong.

This is completely tangential to a serverboard BMC.

Most servers don't need 3D capability, and when they do they get dedicated cards. Adding useless functionality only increases cost and power consumption for no gain.

[starshipeleven]

really it looks like you are just stupid.

I'm not the one that wants to add features that make no sense in some products because I don't understand what they are made for.

This is a goddamn integrated KVM device. It is NOT consumer integrated graphics. They don't need 3D because their customers either don't need 3D or need so much 3D processing power that they are going to install dedicated cards to deal with it.

to use something with a closed source firmware is completely tangential to any server in my point of view...

You are out of touch with reality. Servers are full of, and rely heavily on, devices with closed source firmware, RAID cards, most network cards beyond Gbit (4Gbit, 8Gbit 10Gbit, 40Gbit and beyond), any fiber interconnect, crypto accelerator cards on PCIe, plus their own UEFI firmware of course, and also the BMC device's own firmware that is in most cases not available in source form.

And obviously drive controllers in the drives, and/or additional controllers for SAS backplanes that act as port multipliers, or PLX PCIe controller cards that split a single x16 PCIe slot into 4 x4 slots for NVME SSDs.

[gilboa]

really it looks like you are just stupid... because "If you need 3D capability, install a PCIe graphics card." is not possible if security matters because of the closed source firmware.

so explain to me what kind of PCIe Card has open-source firmware?

to use something with a closed source firmware is completely tangential to any server in my point of view...

1. If you ever tried to install a 25, 40 or 100GbE NIC, and recent age GPU (Be that AMD or nVidia) or a high performance RAID controller on your server, you most likely pulled large number of binary-only firmwares without even noticing. (And that's before we start talking about SSDs and their complex firmware). At this stage, 99.9% of all enterprises on planet earth use hardware that uses closed source binary firmware. Including highly secured state facilities.
2. AST chipset is for management and VGA-over-IP. Nothing else. If you need to 3D over IP or 3D virtualization, there are dedicated (expensive) solutions for that.

... Why do I get the feeling you don't own hardware that uses AST?

- Gilboa

[DanaG]

In my case, I have one board with AST2400, and one board with a Matrox.

If I try starting Gnome with the BMC as the only display, or as primary with a Radeon as secondary, GDM Wayland just gets stuck and never displays.

If I log into an Xorg sesson with BMC + Radeon, I can't use DRI_PRIME or xrandr to render stuff using the Radeon and display the output on the BMC. In fact, the remote display shows nothing at all, because according to xrandr, it has no outputs and no offload (source or sink) capabilities.

My journal also gets a continuous spam of errors, something like "cannot queue page flip: Invalid Argument."

I wouldn't expect it to accelerate 3D, but the device can't even run kmscon, for console font antialiasing. Even a DisplayLink USB device is infinitely better. I wish AMD would make an updated version of that 3D-less Radeon device (ES1000?) as a BMC.

In my case, I ended up giving up on both of those boards, and moving my drives and the Radeon to a board with Intel vPro. It has an Intel GPU with out of band KVM, and DRI_PRIME works for the occasional desktop use, too.

[gilboa]

really why should i buy something what just does not "work" if you read posts like this:

"In my case, I have one board with AST2400, and one board with a Matrox.
(...)
In my case, I ended up giving up on both of those boards"
DanaG

tell me why should i do this? people who have this kind of hardware are very "sad" people.

why not just do what the people ask and then have a great product?
and for example what DanaG ask is very basic stuff.
what i ask is also very basic stuff.

it is pure ignorance if you teach people that the product is perfect(because of a very limited use case) if in fact it is not.

I suggest you re-read my original post.
In short:
A. Server users (read: the ones that usually use AST chipset) usually remote manage their server. I doubt that I ever tried running a full UI console on any of my (many) AST based servers.
B. Server users (see above) usually use complex hardware (be that 25/40/100GbE NIC, hardware RAID, SSDs, etc) that requires binary firmware.
C. I never stated that it anywhere near perfect. I only stated that 99.9999999% of all AST users simply don't care as long as their web-based KVM works reliably...

- Gilboa