HW Acceleration Working

[tkaiser]

That is the direction this discussion should go.

It's great that you constantly remind all of us where we have to look for, in which direction we should walk and even what we have to think. Really love this

May I remind you that problem N°1 of the Pine64 user community is the big difference between expectations raised and reality? And now please read through post #114 of this thread and #120.

BTW: A few months ago I also looked into this Mali madness. But for A64's little sibling H3 (Pine64 is nothing special, just a new member in the large linux-sunxi family of SBCs). I found exactly one application that made use of this 'Mali acceleration' everyone is talking about: es2_gears, that's a benchmark making use of OpenGLES. But I'm no gamer and then others reported that retro games would run fluently now (obviouly making use of OpenGLES acceleration). And after we decided to patch H3 BSP kernel to let Mali400 in H3 run with 600 MHz instead of 252 MHz retro gamers reported that they now get 40 instead of 30 fps in Quake.

In the meantime we tried hard to find any useable use cases for this Mali thingie while wasting hours of our life to find countless bugs/restrictions (eg. Chromium would need Mali driver revision x.y.z since versions prior to that can not accelerate WebGL through OpenGLES and so on). And also in the meantime people here wait for this Mali stuff for video acceleration instead of using it (with an appropriate player that makes use of vdpau/cedrus of course -- and not in any of the browsers since we're talking about aarch64 here and situation is special anyway)

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My bad! I totally forgot our Mali400 use case N°1: Testing DRAM reliability on Allwinner SoCs! For example H3: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...nanopi-m1/

Using the GPU is great since GPU and CPU cores fight for DRAM ressources and by running heavy tasks on the GPU cores and running memtester in parallel we could reliably determine DRAM clockspeed limits and also DRAM calibration issues (that's the reason we at Armbian do limit every H3 board out there to 624 MHz since 672 MHz have to be found not reliable on every board).

So now with Mali400 being able to be accessed on A64 we could start with DRAM reliability testing too on Pine64 and do not have to trust in the vendor's 672 MHz. So I stand corrected. Mali400 acceleration is really useful!