HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro

HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - Printable Version

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+--- Thread: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro (/showthread.php?tid=8650)

HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - ljones - 12-31-2019

Hello all!

I've literally just received my pinebook pro. Fortunatly most things seem to be working - the sound is definately working ok and I'm not experiencing any wifi issues; as for bluetooth however I haven't as yet tried it.

The first thing I did was to update the firmware for the keyboard and touchpad and that went without issue as well. Then it was a case of running the /usr/bin/mrfixit_update.sh . That completed ok and then it was just a case of performing a normal apt update/apt upgrade as per normal debian.

The only problem I seem to be having is with any sort of acceleration on the laptop itself. To give an example I can open (let's say) a terminal window. Moving the window seems to get a little slower if the window is large but the problem is largely with resizing windows - the pinebook pro is struggling to resize windows. Also I've noticed that if I click the menu button (bottom left) there's a big black square that appears just before the menu itself appears.

Is the pinebook not using any sort of xorg acceleration (2d) at all?

Firefox (which seems to crash a lot) also seems to be struggling and just loading a webpage exhibits similar issues; scrolling through a webpage seems to be painfully slow.

I also decided to try to check if 3d (GPU) acceleration is working. Glxgears gives me the result of 295 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.532 fps in a window although a game like "torcs" dosen't seem to be running quite right - it is running at around 1-2fps.

One thing I did notice is I have the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf;

Code:
Section "device"

 Identifier "Rockchip Graphics"

 Driver "modesetting"

 Option "AccelMethod" "glamor"

 Option "DRI" "2"

 Option "Dri2Vsync" "true"

 Option "TripleBuffer" "true"

EndSection

Section "Screen"

 Identifier "Default Screen"

 Subsection "Display"

 Depth 24

 Modes "1920x1080" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600"

 EndSection

EndSection

So I see that the device is using modesetting/glamor but presumably it isn't quite working 100% since there seems to be a lack of any 2d (xorg) or 3d (GPU) acceleration?

Update: I have a couple of errors in /var/log/Xorg.0.log which look concering too;

Code:
$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0/log | grep error

[4.651] (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/dri/rockchip_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/dri/rockchip_dri.so : cannot openm shared object file : No such file or directory)

[4.771] (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/arm-gnueabihf/dri/swrast_dri.so: undefined symbol: _glapi_ tls Dispatch)

Update: I tried to run a different OS from microsd (in my case I chose q4os) -- it seemed to be a touch slower with moving windows but resizing was much better and it did not have the sluggishness surrounding the menu button.

Is this all down to drivers and kernel verison?

ljones

RE: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - ElektromAn - 01-02-2020

... currently not tested from my side

need to figure out which driver I need to compile and which kernel module I need
PANFROST vs. LIMA

but if @tsys work/config for manjaro arm is correct

Code:
[elektroman@PinebookPro-1 ~]$ lsmod | grep panfrost

panfrost               53248  0

gpu_sched              28672  1 panfrost

drm                   532480  9 gpu_sched,drm_kms_helper,dw_mipi_dsi,panel_simple,rockchipdrm,dw_hdmi,panfrost,analogix_dp

PANFROST is right.

maybe I must check mesa-git ...

RE: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - ljones - 06-18-2020

Is there an update on all of this at all? After updating I still see the same errors and still no accelerated X .....:-(

ljones

RE: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - PakoSt - 06-18-2020

@ljones , I will try and fail spectacularly to explain it short:
- mrfixit's Debian image is using 4.4 kernel with the Mali blobs. gl4es is enabled by default there which gets you to accelerated 2d/3d for games - think of it as translation from desktop GL to GLES2 commands. Lots of various work has been done to get better performance on the Mate build (I think you will be better with Chromium with this Debian build btw).

- To use Panfrost, you will need a distro running the latest kernels (5+) -> more recent kernel the better. Think Manjaro, Arch Linux ARM, postmarketOS, Gentoo, the unofficial Debian installer, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc (sorry for not listing all upstream distros, great work all!). On top of that you will need to be running recent Mesa version - at the very least Mesa 19.2. Of course newer Mesa version is better.

Since you asked for accelerated X environment, there can be caveats. XFCE on Manjaro is defaulting to Xrender as it's compositor doesn't play well with Panfrost but it's still plenty fast (this could've changed since I last checked it a few months ago). KDE Manjaro on the other hand just needs to have the compositor enabled and you will enjoy very fast desktop experience. Wayland DEs play a lot better with hardware acceleration but may not be your cup of tea.

The great news! Pinebook Pro is near feature completeness in the latest kernels - this is getting close to "plug-and-play" territory for all distros. It's getting really close to the point where no special distro images will be needed

Note:
Lima is targeting the Allwinner SOCs with older Mali 400 series GPUs. Panfrost is the open source driver for the Mali GPU inside the Rockchip SOC found in the Pinebook Pro or newer

RE: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - xmixahlx - 06-19-2020

which OS are you using? manjaro or debian?

RE: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - ljones - 09-13-2020

(06-19-2020, 10:02 AM)xmixahlx Wrote: which OS are you using? manjaro or debian?

Apologies for reviving an old thread and post!

Well right now I'm retrying things. Confession time -- I've hardly touched my pinebook pro since posting my last message (above) on here. Not a fan of sloooowly resizing or moving windows. Right now I'm using the debian installer although it appears this version of debian dosen't seem to support panfrost at all. 3D works - a little - but it is still down at around 7-9fps for example in torcs. I did once try armbian a while back but I've not tried it again recently; last time I did there was no 2d or 3d acceleration at all!

I did see the one made by "mrfixit2001" here but that looks pretty much out of date - it dates from the end of 2019.

One thing to note which was intresting - I tried installing full KDE plasma on debian (using the debian installer). I also enabled - as a test - "wobbly windows". I do see that this version of debian though has a similar issue with 3D as does the Raspberry pi 4. Example (this is what I tried); install full kde plasma and enable wobbly windows and then move a window around. The window will sometimes move smoothly but then become jerky but then go back to smooth again. The exact same issue exists on the pi4 I've found btw.

Did anyone manage to get the 2D (panfrost/xorg) acceleration drivers working in debian at all?

ljones

RE: HW Acceleration for 2d/3d on pinebook pro - xmixahlx - 09-19-2020

so the problem is blazing your own trail here unnecessarily.

mrfixit2001 desktop
manjaro
unofficial debian installer

these all work well with gpu and vpu hwaccel.

manjaro and the unnofficial debian installer use kernel 5.x which uses panfrost.

you cant install random things made for other distributions. that isnt how linux works.

easiest way to do this is just use manjaro out of the box.