Linux Display Driver Worked On For A Popular & Low-Cost RISC-V SoC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Display Driver Worked On For A Popular & Low-Cost RISC-V SoC

The "v1" patches were posted today for a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver to be used for display purposes with the StarFive JH7110, a low-cost RISC-V SoC found in the VisionFive boards, PINE64 Star64, and other low-cost RISC-V single board computers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/StarFive-JH7110-DRM-Driver

[coder]

The JH7110 relies on VeriSilicon / Innosilicon IP for the display controller.

VeriSilicon is who ended up with Vivante's IP. Any word on whether there's a full GPU block in there, or is it simply the display controller?

If it has some derivative of Vivante's IP, I wonder how much work is needed to get the etnaviv driver working on it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Etnaviv-2020-Driver-Progress

[RejectModernity]

VeriSilicon is who ended up with Vivante's IP. Any word on whether there's a full GPU block in there, or is it simply the display controller?

If it has some derivative of Vivante's IP, I wonder how much work is needed to get the etnaviv driver working on it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Etnaviv-2020-Driver-Progress

StarFive JH7110 uses Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU

[ayumu]

The article glaringly omitted this important, relevant link:

https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan

[uid313]

I would like a RISC-V board with integrated Intel Xe graphics, or AMD RDNA3 graphics.

[ayumu]

I would like a RISC-V board with integrated Intel Xe graphics, or AMD RDNA3 graphics.

Next best thing: PCIe slot.

Star64 is cheap, based on the same JH7110 this story is about, and provides such a slot.

People are definitely running AMD GPUs on theirs, but I am not sure anyone's tested AMD RDNA3 or Intel Xe.

[gnattu]

I would like a RISC-V board with integrated Intel Xe graphics, or AMD RDNA3 graphics.

GCN cards are definitely supported but not everything after. We have patches to make RDNA2 cards working on a SiFive Unmatched, but I'm not sure if it is upstreamed. Intel i915 driver does not even compile against anything not x86 because it is directly using x86/asm.h in the driver. The newer xe driver is theoretically compile-able against RISC-V, but I guess nobody has tested that on RISC-V. If I remembered it correctly someone had success on arm systems.

[Quackdoc]

Next best thing: PCIe slot.

Star64 is cheap, based on the same JH7110 this story is about, and provides such a slot.

People are definitely running AMD GPUs on theirs, but I am not sure anyone's tested AMD RDNA3 or Intel Xe.

star64 isn't quite there since it's only pcie 2.0 1x, unfortunately while the visionfive 2 comes with an nvme slot someone posted an lspci from it, and it too seems to only run at pcie 2.0 x1. Im not sure if this is a limitation on the JH7110 or not, but either way i would hold off until at least a 4x comes available. if only I had the money of the pioneer

[coder]

either way i would hold off until at least a 4x comes available. if only I had the money of the pioneer

Why? For storage, 500 MB/s is nearly as fast as the top SATA 3 speed you'll see in practice. I'm still using SATA 3 SSDs in a couple PCs today, and they're totally fine.

For graphics, PCIe 2.0 x1 should be fine for desktop graphics. For video playback, you could do 1080p 60 fps software decoding and barely cram it over the bus at that speed. And if you're using the GPU to decode, then you could comfortably do any resolution/framerate combination.

[Alexmitter]

The poor PCIe support for that SoC really is unfortunate. But still, my visionfive fully boots from NVMe and thats very nice compared to many common ARM SoCs.