HW Acceleration Working

[ssvb]

Great news!

So forgive my ignorance but what are the practical implications of this driver release? Does this improve video performance across the board, or only in cases where 3D acceleration is needed? I have been playing with mine as a headless server thus far due to the various bugs in HDMI output (overscan, generally slow rendering). Will this fix the overscan?

A short answer. Mali is only useful for 3D graphics. In principle, 2D graphics can be treated as a subset of 3D and some 2D applications may be accelerated too (such as Qt5 applications), but this is rather uncommon in Linux. For example, the popular lightweight LXDE/XFCE/MATE desktops don't use or need any 3D acceleration at all.

HDMI/LCD is handled by the display driver, which is already available as part of the kernel and is open source (though earlier it was missing GPL license notices in the source files, bringing it into a legal gray area). Guess why we can see something on the screen even without the Mali driver? ;-)

Hardware video decoding for H.264 and other media codecs is done by the Cedar VPU accelerator and it is already supported to some extent: http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=424

Now a somewhat tricky part is to make all these pieces of hardware play nicely together. This may take a bit of time and efforts.