ARM Mali accelerators support in Linux 5.2 | Hacker News Reader

ARM Mali accelerators support in Linux 5.2

lists.gt.net

136 pointsdoener40 comments

This is exciting for quite a few boards and notebooks, notably the new Pinebook Pro (RK3399) and the Asus C201 (RK3288) both benefiting from the Panfrost driver.

I wrote a bit a while back on Reddit regarding my experience with the C201 and Linux: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bebm93/linux_on_asus...

Now with open 3D acceleration, the last remaining bit of proprietary code on the C201 is the WiFi chip. Not sure how much of an impact it'll have, but when Cypress bought Broadcom's wireless division it released the datasheet for this and many other chips (PDF): https://www.cypress.com/file/298141/download

Alyssa Rosenzweig is making amazing progress with Panfrost working at Collabora. Panfrost is now working with GNOME, two months ahead of schedule!: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/gnome-meets-panfrost.html

Sadly it is hard to get a new C201PA these days? It is a 3 year old machine that has been discontinued.

But it is truly unique as you pointed out, it can be run almost binary blob free or totally free if you replace the wireless chip (simply plug in a tiny Atheros USB adapter).

We are finally getting a viable alternative to the x86 ecosystem. It's about time. Thank you to everyone putting in the work on this.

I wish ARM was open about the video hardware as Intel and AMD are.

Anyone know if this is relevant to the odroid n2? https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram/

It's a superb recently released board but with v limited GPU support at the minute.

A cursory glance looks like it has a supported Mali.

The board doesn't have upstream kernel support (like almost all SBCs unfortunately) so unless a) the Mali on the ODroid is included in this support (Different Mali generations have quite different interfaces) and b) the Mali support was the main thing preventing upstream kernel support (which is possible but unlikely), I'd it's likely to be irrelevant :(

Upstream / mainline support for G12A has been added in this release. Odroid-N2 (based on the similar G12B) support will most likely land in 5.3 [1].

[1] http://linux-meson.com/doku.php#kernel_mainlining_progress

Oh that's great, my mistake!

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19908741

I'm super-excited to see this come together. I've been working on an aarch64-based product with a Mali GPU, and it's been so frustrating to be stuck on the ancient vendor kernel for no reason other than "it's the one that the Mali blobs are compiled against". I can't wait for this to be a non-issue for us. Thank you to the developers working on this, and to the companies sponsoring it!

I'll wait for mesa 19.2 (end of august), which is other part of this.

This is great news for Pine64 and their Pinephone.

Does it mean my cheap Orange Pi 3 will be neck to neck with Raspberry Pi4?

No, these are very very early reverse-engineered drivers. They will likely fail to run lots of EGL applications.

The driver for the VC6 in the RPi4 is mature and written by someone with access to the underlying hardware definition code and full Broadcom documentation.

VC4 is no powerhorse, so...

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ARM-Mali-T720-MP2.145232.0.htm... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Broadcom-VideoCore-IV.116484.0...

  See 3DMark - Ice Storm Standard Graphics 1280x720

VC VI is maybe 30% faster than VC IV.

So it looks like Opi3 may be pretty much in the same (low) performance bracket with RPi4.

That's with an optimized vendor driver, which will perform vastly better than what is currently in the kernel & Mesa. I'd agree that the VC6 and T720 are probably equal levels of terrible, though, just from a hardware capability PoV.

It remains to be seen. Orange Pi 3 will be supported by panfrost driver, which seems to have a way more active development team than lima. So I think there's a good chance the support will be pretty good in a year's time.

I have no clue about relative performance of Mali-T720 (H6's GPU) and whatever is in RPi4.

And it's weird that on topic normal questions are downvoted here. Hard to explain.

DRM is of course critical, but what is the status of Mesa drivers so we can have actual OpenGL and I guess also Vulkan these days?

This means, Raspberry Pi will be able to perform much better on kernel 5.2?

RPi doesn't have a Mali GPU.

Nah, RaspbPi uses Broadcom Videocore as its GPU, not ARM Mali.

Modern Malis are amazing.

I am not sure if there are any benchmark websites but I feel that Broadcom's Videocore technology is way behind most of the high end smartphone GPU competition, such as Mali, Adreno, PowerVR, etc.

That's a given. Broadcom effectively abandoned Videocore. The only significant user of Videocore GPUs nowadays is the Raspberry Pi and this is a thorn in Broadcom's eye.

It's interesting then that the RPi4 has a VideoCore6 vs 4 with a ton more features. I'm not sure why Broadcom would put in the work if RPi was the only real consumer.

Because the VideoCore 6 is also already an ancient design. And last I checked Broadcom is still doing set top box stuff, which is where these chips are from:

https://www.broadcom.com/products/broadband/set-top-box

I guess they are just reducing their efforts as set top boxes are phased out in favor of smart TVs or Android TV and similar.

The Pi chips are probably surplus. This is how many SBC vendors are able to sell their boards so cheaply. It's a good repurposing as well, lots of these chips were going to sit in warehouses until the end of time.

The Pi chips are not surplus and never have been after the original Raspberry.

Yeah, every Raspberry Pi chip that came after the original was custom designed and created for the sole purpose of being used in Raspberry Pis. They just made some... interesting design decisions.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation was definitely optimizing for the IP their volunteers & employees were familiar with and had confidence in.

Other boards beat the Raspberry Pi in mainline kernel support, USB & Ethernet I/O & price years ago, but there is a significant ecosystem that the Foundation seeks to support, and the best way they know how to do so is with the tools they are intimately familiar with.

> Other boards beat the Raspberry Pi in mainline kernel support, USB & Ethernet I/O & price years ago

You sound knowledgeable, so I'll ask: if you don't care about the RPi ecosystem (or IoT use-cases at all, really), what's the optimum SBC across all those axes currently? Like, what board would you choose to base a cheap one-off HTPC+NAS on?

I like the OrangePi lineup, particularly the OrangePi PC Plus as it has 8GB eMMC and decent specs while being sub-$30 with a case and accessories: https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32668421022.html

For a NAS, nearly all of the OrangePis feature USB ports & ethernet that are directly wired to the SOC, so you aren't I/O limited like older Raspberry Pi's. That being said, the Allwinner H3 doesn't support 10 bit Hevc/H.265 acceleration, so you might want to go with a board based on a newer chip for a HTPC. Take a peek at LibreELEC, they have a decent HTPC distro for many SBCs.

Wasn't aware of that, thanks for the clarification.

Is there a mobile gpu benchmark site? That would be incredibly useful.

There is a good review here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14385/arm-announces-malig77-g...

It means that the pi is going to get some competition from other SBC that use a Mali GPU, in terms of graphics performance. From what i understand thought, this is an open source driver for Mali similar to the nouveau driver for nvidia cards

Currently all Raspberry Pis have a VideoCore chip, so this is not helping any of them. Except of course these v3d (= the new driver for Raspberry Pi GPUs) changes:

  v3d: 
  - v3d v4.2 support

However, Mali changes might help RPi5 whenever it is released in 2-3 years. There's a good chance RPi4 is the end of the line for VideoCore chips. Mali is a logical replacement for it, especially considering recent open source driver improvements.

Does this mean I can have 2d accel in X11 on my peach pit? with mainline since 3.6 or so it has been an excellent terminal and even music making machine, but browsing is a bit painful.

Any chance you have a link to the peach pit? Not turning up many SBCs by that name when I search for it...

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

Later they re-released a version with an intel cpu with the same branding, so the machine is hard to google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com