HW Acceleration Working

[tkaiser]

Regarding the idea of creating a How To, do you have any suggestions?

I have a rather simple suggestion: your How To should start clarifying things first: What does a GPU (this differs from what the average Pine64 user knowns from his PC background where the GPU is said to accelerate all sorts of things: 2D, 3D and video which is NOT the case here), what does this specific GPU (no OpenGL, just OpenGLES), what's needed to take advantage of OpenGLES drivers with the application of choice (nope, nearly none of them work out of the box, huge amounts of patching are required), what to expect from an ultra-slow 8 years old GPU in terms of 3D performance (yes, it's only about 3D and maybe accelerating some window manager effects in X11 or Kodi), why bothering with this stuff on a system where display output is that limited (we have a crippled HDMI driver relying on blobs, no documentation at all and source code with unusable license situation so no one can write display drivers for A64 that do not suck), and why does stuff on arm64 works differently than on armhf.

If you're done with this the hype regarding Mali blobs might already be over. Mali400 is about 3D acceleration, 2D/desktop acceleration is done differently and video decoding/encoding is also something completely different handled by different hardware engines in Allwinner SoCs.

Longsleep all the time asked what might differ for you personally when you get these mythical Mali blobs in your hands. If you answer this question first you know whether you still need to wait or not. And indeed Lenny could share some light on where this Mali blob hype originated from.