Question about graphics support

[mcc]

Hello, I am interested in the Pinebook Pro. I see the Pinebook and Pinebook Pro both have the "Mali T860 MP4 GPU". I am not familiar with this GPU.

My question is: Do the Pinebooks support Vulkan, and do they support compute shaders? Does the "Manjaro Linux" it ships with include drivers which already support these two things? Thanks

[Arwen]

If the underlying reason for your questions are about the GPU performance, the Pinebook Pro is likely not for you.

It performs well for most desktop tasks. Some of the general or video acceleration is not complete in all distros.
Even though the RockChip RK3399 has been out for a while, the Linux kernel work is still on-going for both CPU and
the GPU.

To compare, for the money, the Pinebook Pro gives quite good graphical experience, (assuming all the bits and
pieces are configured properly with the kernel). But, it's no where near an average x64 laptop in GPU performance.

Sorry, I don't know about Vulkan, nor the compute shaders.

[mcc]

Hi,
The question is not about performance but rather supported GPU APIs. I do a lot of games coding. If I got an extra laptop for portability, I might work on projects on it, and I might test those projects. For purposes of such a test, it would not matter if the performance were good (or else I wouldn't be trying to run it on a $200 spare laptop). But what would matter is whether the code runs at all. If the code had to fall back on legacy OpenGL APIs then it would not be testing the same things.
Anyway thanks

[xmixahlx]

read these:
https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-soft...user-space
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/...as-landed/

rk3399 supports vulkan and opencl via the binary mali blob. panfrost is an open source project reverse engineering it in early status: gles 3.0 and gl 3.3 are experimental, and no vulkan or opencl, yet.

[mcc]

rk3399 supports vulkan and opencl via the binary mali blob. panfrost is an open source project reverse engineering it in early status: gles 3.0 and gl 3.3 are experimental, and no vulkan or opencl, yet.

Thanks, that's exactly the information I needed. Do you happen to know, does the version of Manjaro KDE that ships with the Pinebook Pro come with the mali blob pre-installed?

[Der Geist der Maschine]

does the version of Manjaro KDE that ships with the Pinebook Pro come with the mali blob pre-installed?

Recent distributions come with panfrost and so also Manjaro.

The original pre-installed Debian distribution comes with Mali https://github.com/mrfixit2001/debian_desktop/releases - it's quite easy to install. You can also parallel install it on a micro SD card and keep Manjaro on the internal eMMC.

I assume Ayufan's Ubuntu distributions also come with Mali - at least the ones released last year. Don't take my word for it.

[xmixahlx]

somehow i gave you the wrong link...
https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-soft...ard-kernel

and see these also:
https://developer.arm.com/solutions/grap...an-drivers
https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/gr...-t880-gpus
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(GPU)

rk3399 uses T860.

[cryo1970]

I have a Manjaro minimal install on my Pinebook Pro, and I would like to try the proprietary GPU drivers to have Vulkan support, but I can't find any guides on how to proceed. The page https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics gives instructions for a Debian system, but I am not proficient enough with Linux to "translate" to my use case. [/url][url=https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics]I am on 5.8.10-2-MANJARO-ARM (output of uname -r). If I have to compile my own kernel, how do I use the kernel drivers from https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-soft...ard-kernel - are they kernel headers? And where do the user-space binary drivers (https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-soft...user-space) fit in?

If there are any guides or tutorials on using the proprietary MaliGPU drivers without having to resort to using a prepackaged image, I would be grateful for a link. I am sorry to post in an old thread, but I couldn't find much relating to Vulkan or proprietary driver installation on Pinebook Pro.

[poVoq]

The main problem with these binary drivers is that they likely depend on an older Linux kernel and can only be made to work with that specific supported version. On stable release distributions like Debian or Ubuntu this can work well, but it doesn't mesh well with a bleeding edge rolling release distribution like Manjaro. In fact the same problem crops up with binary Nvidia drivers on x86 and they are much more proactive with binary driver releases than ARM.

But given that the PinebookPro also depends on quite some functionality only recently added upstream to the Linux Kernel, you will probably not only need an older Kernel, but also one with a lot of custom patches applied. Hence only a dedicated system image specifically prepared for the PineBookPro will work unless you want to do this custom patching of an older kernel yourself.

[cryo1970]

The main problem with these binary drivers is that they likely depend on an older Linux kernel and can only be made to work with that specific supported version. On stable release distributions like Debian or Ubuntu this can work well, but it doesn't mesh well with a bleeding edge rolling release distribution like Manjaro. In fact the same problem crops up with binary Nvidia drivers on x86 and they are much more proactive with binary driver releases than ARM.

But given that the PinebookPro also depends on quite some functionality only recently added upstream to the Linux Kernel, you will probably not only need an older Kernel, but also one with a lot of custom patches applied. Hence only a dedicated system image specifically prepared for the PineBookPro will work unless you want to do this custom patching of an older kernel yourself.

Thank you for a clear and thorough explanation. With my skill level, I should probably stay with the Panfrost driver then....