Debian GPU Support

[Atton]

I must ask if there a version of debian for the pinebook pro that can support the gpu without having to get too deep into recompiling things?(somewhat pain free install)

[moonwalkers]

I must ask if there a version of debian for the pinebook pro that can support the gpu without having to get too deep into recompiling things?(somewhat pain free install)

I'm running a stock Debian Unstable on mine. Until recently the only non-Debian package I was running was kernel built using xmixahx's script, but nowadays I'm running stock Debian kernel 5.10.0-7 (A.K.A. 5.10.40). No other third-party or manually compiled packages, GPU acceleration seems to work fine, or at least well enough for DE compositor and media player. In fact, the Debian kernel seems to be a bit more stable than the patched 5.8.5 I used to run - according to uptimed my average uptime on 5.10.40 is several times higher than it was on 5.8.5, and I had more reboots due to updates requiring them than due to system freezing. Can't say anything about performance though - it doesn't seem any worse than on 5.8.5, but I haven't really pushed it to say it's any better than 5.8.5 either.

[xmixahlx]

I'll update the scripts eventually! I don't have any stability issues. What are yours?

[Atton]

I worked through the problems with the debian installer. However it would appear mesa is another story.

[kuleszdl]

I see a lot of panfrost-related issues pop up in dmesg when after doing basic things such as resizing windows. So yes, it's enabled by default but I doubt it works well.

(running Debian11 with sysvinit, vanilla kernel and lxqt)

[cobratbq]

I wrote a larger post explaining in more detail just now, but it still needs to be approved. I managed to get GPU support working properly in Debian's 5.10 and 5.14 kernels, by fixing a missing dependency-issue.

Create a file `/etc/modprobe.d/panfrost.conf`:

Code:

softdep panfrost pre: governor_simpleondemand

Then run `sudo update-initramfs -u` to make this config file part of the initrd file, i.e. part of early boot.

Without this, `dmesg` shows that it repeatedly tries loading 'panfrost' and failing. I can only get it to load after Xorg and my desktop are loaded. And then I would need to restart the desktop manager to make GLX/acceleration/DRI work. If you do this, you should see Mesa Panfrost support in `glxinfo`.