Arch-Manjaro attempting gles2 setup

[tomarm]

Hi folks.  I'll tell yoos about my experience and goals for my Rock64 1GB.

First I installed Archlinux ARM per their wiki.   15 mins I was up and ssh'ed in.    SSH freezes. gah   off to googling.
Not a happy start.  Saw a thread here on it that has no solution.   Found out to install ethtool and turn off TX.   Fixed I hope.

I then setup a sdcard to flash my SPI with ayufan's tool.    Installed Arch to a 2.5" hdd and hey  it booted from usb3....but it freezes.
Moved usb cable to usb2 port...seems ok.   Need answers on this usb3 issue.   I've read it's a problem.   I use sdcard for now.

Here's where I'm working now:   Installed X on both Manjaro and Arch arm.  Only fbdev works which I hear is about all most want or try to get working.   I want gles2 for qt5-gles so I can install and run KDE Plasma DE on both X and wayland.

Problems:  I've tried to install and build from source mesa-git mesa-arm-git  and they won't even build.   I suppose I dont have the chops yet to get a aarch64 toolchain installed correctly on the r64.  I see pkgs in the arm repo's but no how-to's on the net yet.


So if anyone has the above DE working with hardware accelerated gpu for the Mali-450 I'd like to work with you or hear your steps.   It involves  getting these parts all working.    mainline 5.4.x kernel options right for this board/gpu  that being lima driver and lima drm.    X pkgs like libdrm  mesa-20-git etc and then qt5 built for gles.   gles=OpenGL-ES  I think.

So far I'm not very impressed but I'm willing to work the bugs out of this board and dev the gpu some because it's cheap and powerful but a challenge.     If I wanted plug and play kde I'd have bought a pricier board.   

Cheers, tomarm

[Luke]

Did you fetch the newest R64 Manjaro image? if not, then check their downloads section. Also, if Manjaro is what you specifically want, it may be a better idea to ask in their forum OR ask Strit in the chats.

[tomarm]

Yes Luke I spoke with Strit. He's not too talkative. What I gathered for those interested in running this board on opengl es is that the lima driver is in very rough shape.
Memory page errors and core dumps is what it gives mostly on gles. X is ok but slow. Bottom line is for gles to work alot of the base packages like QT5 have to be compiled for it. That requires a dev or user with the knowledge and hardware to get that giant pkg built right. Strit built like 3 qt ones and called it a day I guess. Also Qt first needs a solid mesa version and mali-lima-kernel support and the combo looks like a bad one. I read the panfrost is in better shape than lima. Also, If one looks in the qt-base pkg under the mkspecs you will find configs for rpi and a dozen or so others. Nothing close to a rk3328 chip config in there to work with.

I'm disappointed that this is the case but I didn't lose alot of money so it is what it is. Nobody really to blame. State of the art thing.
Hope this info helps somebody down the road with the same goal. A fast pretty desktop on a cheap quad core SBC.