Rockpro64 panfrost installation questions

[user12321]

Hi,

Sorry if it seems like this comes across as a wall of questions, but they all seem kind of small on their own and not worthy of their own threads.

Ive been trying to install Panfrost onto Armbian Buster (desktop, kernel version 5.4)on my rockpro64 and fell like im getting absolutly nowhere with it. I followed the installation guide (here), but dont think anything came of it (issues I had regarding screen resolution persisted). First question if, when checking if CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST is enabled (grep PANFROST /boot/config-5.4etcetc) it came up with CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST=m. I take it this means it isnt enabled, and to enable it the kernel would need to be recompiled?

The next question is does Panfrost usually require any more setting up after the steps listed in the guide above? Asking since as far as I can tell Xorg still loads the modesetting drivers instead of mesa/panfrost (looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows Xorg still loading fbdev_drv.so and modesetting_drv.so, with no mention of other graphics drivers). Even if CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST=m is incorrect (I suspect it is), ninja seemed to exit without any errors, which leads me to believe that it installed correctly (to some extent at least)

Final question - is it still even necessary to install panfrost using the guide above? Main reason I ask this is it seems quite old, with panfrost having been around for a few years now and seeming to work reasonably well have any of the rk3399 distros added it to their repos, or is that still quite far down the line/am i just misunderstanding how panfrost works?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[aleksei]

Hi,

Sorry if it seems like this comes across as a wall of questions, but they all seem kind of small on their own and not worthy of their own threads.

Ive been trying to install Panfrost onto Armbian Buster (desktop, kernel version 5.4)on my rockpro64 and fell like im getting absolutly nowhere with it. I followed the installation guide (here), but dont think anything came of it (issues I had regarding screen resolution persisted). First question if, when checking if CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST is enabled (grep PANFROST /boot/config-5.4etcetc) it came up with CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST=m. I take it this means it isnt enabled, and to enable it the kernel would need to be recompiled?

The next question is does Panfrost usually require any more setting up after the steps listed in the guide above? Asking since as far as I can tell Xorg still loads the modesetting drivers instead of mesa/panfrost (looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows Xorg still loading fbdev_drv.so and modesetting_drv.so, with no mention of other graphics drivers). Even if CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST=m is incorrect (I suspect it is), ninja seemed to exit without any errors, which leads me to believe that it installed correctly (to some extent at least)

Final question - is it still even necessary to install panfrost using the guide above? Main reason I ask this is it seems quite old, with panfrost having been around for a few years now and seeming to work reasonably well have any of the rk3399 distros added it to their repos, or is that still quite far down the line/am i just misunderstanding how panfrost works?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST=m means you want to build it as a kernel module. Use CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST=y instead.
Xorg drivers/modules are different from kernel modules.
Search these forums for "mainline", I don't own RockPro64 yet but I've seen some positive reports here, maybe building mesa is no longer necessary.

[xmixahlx]

you need kernel 5.2+ and mesa 19.1+ for panfrost. i would use latest available via unstable/experimental or backports. enabled as a module is fine. test the driver in use via glxinfo.

if you are feeling adventurous you can use the same build scripts as the ones i made for the pinebook pro, which uses the same cpu and gpu.