State of GPU Driver

GameShell
1

Hi,

I’ve decided to pick this up again after thinking about the possibility of using this as a portable Midi synthesizer (homebrew of course) instead of just an emulator machine.

With that, may I know what is the state of the Mali drivers right now?

I read that Sunxi was able to run an OPENGL rendering stability test 24/7 for 1.5 months on the R16/A33 sometime this year and I would like to know if proper drivers have been included with the Gameshell yet.

Thanks for the amazing support previously and I am glad that I will become part of this community soon in January 2019.

2

Do you have a link about that?

3

https://bootlin.com/blog/more-opengl-binaries-for-the-mali-support-on-allwinner-platforms-with-mainline-linux/

Here, I’m not sure how reliable it is but I’m seeing multiple places talking about funded VPU or GPU acceleration drivers.

4

I also tried

but none of the drivers can run on GS now

5

May I have the link to the latest post by the developers on the state of the drivers?

6

I’m interested to hear what the developers have to say too. I did a bit of research on this and discovered this repository: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/lima/web/wikis/home
Which aim is to create an open source replacement.

Edit: Seems like there is one developer working on on an open source driver for the Mali GPU. It was proposed to add it to mainline. [1]
But, it’s lacking a few things such as power management, which sounds like it’d be important for the gameshell :slight_smile:. Kind of bummed to learn this, but I already placed an order so oh well :sweat_smile:.

  1. https://lwn.net/Articles/755084/
1 Like
7

@guu and @yong :

I noticed that in the v0.21 image, you’ve compiled the lima Mali400 drivers into the kernel:

# dmesg | grep -i lima
[    0.882332] lima 1c40000.gpu: bus rate = 200000000
[    0.887121] lima 1c40000.gpu: mod rate = 384000000
[    0.892318] lima 1c40000.gpu: gp - mali400 version major 1 minor 1
[    0.898555] lima 1c40000.gpu: pp0 - mali400 version major 1 minor 1
[    0.904850] lima 1c40000.gpu: pp1 - mali400 version major 1 minor 1
[    0.911155] lima 1c40000.gpu: l2 cache 64K, 4-way, 64byte cache line, 64bit external bus
[    0.919735] [drm] Initialized lima 1.0.0 20170325 for 1c40000.gpu on minor 0

With this, and with compiling the lima-mesa fork, I was able to get an accelerated kmscube running, and am working on compiling glmark2 right now. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get retroarch or other apps to leverage the DRI layer (yet).

Before I spend any more time on this, will one of you say what the current state is of the dev team working on Mali400 acceleration? I don’t want to waste my entire holiday vacation working on this if you’re already ahead of me. Obviously, the whole community is looking forward to this :slight_smile:

Similarly, if I can help you at all in any way, please let me know.

Finally, what steps did you take to compile lima into the kernel? Your other post here doesn’t include any patches for lima: CPI Kernel Source

3 Likes
8

Good news:YES, we can speed up the retroarch with lima & SDL2 , most games/emulators can run at 720P@60fps
Bad news: Lima is an incomplete driver, it produces some strange crashes.
we are debugging right now…

10 Likes
9

That’s great news ! So SDL2 games work better with 0.21? Good job this will unlock the full potential of CPI, keep it up

10

Will there be further updates to the driver before the game jam is complete? I’ve been working on a software renderer (which I plan to continue to do either way) but thought I might take some time to do an OGL ES wrapper if driver support is there.

Thanks! looking forward to seeing more updates on this.

11

This is great news! Thanks! Eagerly waiting!

12

How did you get kmscube running?
I got the error:
failed to load driver: sun4i_drm