Collabora Posts New DRM Kernel Driver For Open-Source Arm Mali Graphics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Collabora Posts New DRM Kernel Driver For Open-Source Arm Mali Graphics

Collabora's Tomeu Vizoso has posted an initial set of patches he's been working on along with Rob Herring on developing a new open-source kernel DRM driver for Arm's Bifrost and Midgard graphics hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-DRM-Initial-RFC

[Baguy]

This is nice to see even if it's old hardware. SBCs could definitely benefit from work like this.

[andreano]

That's it, I'm buying the pinebook pro.

I've stayed away from Allwinner and Mali for seven years now – after a disappointing driver experience with the Hackberry A10, I have sworn by GPUs from Broadcom/Vivante/Adreno. But with this amount of good news around Panfrost, those massively popular RK3399 boards are starting to look tempting.

[esmth]

I am excited for this! I have an OG HP chromebook 11 G1 with the Samsung Exynos cpu and midguard mali graphics. Recently google dropped all chromeos support for it, and i've been struggling on and off for awhile to get the proprietary driver to work.

[hajj_3]

That's it, I'm buying the pinebook pro.

I've stayed away from Allwinner and Mali for seven years now – after a disappointing driver experience with the Hackberry A10, I have sworn by GPUs from Broadcom/Vivante/Adreno. But with this amount of good news around Panfrost, those massively popular RK3399 boards are starting to look tempting.

Amlogic S922X is a better chip than RK3399, uses cortex a73 and mali Bitfrost gpu. No laptops announced for this SoC yet though but you can buy the Odroid-N2 board soon.

[andreano]

Odroid-N2

Nice! Their Linux support is not great yet, but at least they admit it – I think this sums it up pretty well for the state of Linux on ARM:

https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/

An Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image is available with Kernel version 4.9.152 LTS at this moment. This kernel version will be officially supported until Jan, 2023.
A hardware accelerated video decoder (VPU) driver is ready. We have c2player and kplayer examples which can play 4K/UHD H.265 60fps videos smoothly on the framebuffer of ODROID-N2 HDMI output.
The Mali G52 GPU Linux driver works only on the framebuffer. We tested the latest PPSSPP emulation and it can handle x3 scaling on a 4K display nicely with well implemented VSYNC.
There will be a Linux Wayland driver a few months later. We are intensively working on it together with Arm and Amlogic.
Unfortunately, there is no X11 GPU driver since Arm has no plan to support X11 for Bifrost GPUs anymore.
We hope that the Panfrost open source driver can be ported to ODROID-N2 soon.

Fun fact: Odroid-N2 runs stress-ng cooler than my Pico-pi IMX8M idles … such happens when CPU sleep states are left unimplemented (mine has a generously sized heatsink too) … and IMX8M is supposed to be in a phone soon…