Panfrost G5x GPU Support Coming to Kernel 5.10

We have been waiting for way too long.

Good news is, this time around it got some blessing from Bifrost.

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@O635789 did you check this out ? :slight_smile:

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Yes I saw that post. However, I tried the Ubuntu image with kernel 5.9, hardware acceleration appears not working in Chromium after set the flags, I doubt the driver is activated.

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The driver is still in beta, Iā€™m sure those discrepancies will be resolved soon after official release :slight_smile:

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You can check dmesg output to see if the driver in enabled.

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@O635789 We are updating the kernel to 5.10-rc6. Tested the panfrost driver and it already works normally on VIM3. When we release, you can use panfrost on VIM3

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The greatest news in a long time!

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@O635789 We will release soon

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cant wait ā€¦ thank you for the great effort

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Been running Elecrā€™s 5.10 with panfrost and mesaā€™s git master from Jan 15-20. Finally stable, no crashing under Xorg or Wayfire/Wayland. No HDMI glitches, no window texture errors.

Only one GL/GLes program so far has triggered a driver error, and thatā€™s NifSkope
NifSkope: ā€¦/src/gallium/drivers/panfrost/pan_job.c:1306: pan_pack_color: Assertion `!ā€œUnknown generic format size packing clear colourā€ā€™ failed.

Everything else so far has worked without rendering errors, albeit somewhat slowly. Mali g52 is ā€˜unoptimizedā€™ according to the developers.

its not ā€œmyā€ 5.10 lol
its just the image built with the script :smile:

tbh, its ā€œourā€ kernel :stuck_out_tongue:

Iā€™d like to do whatever you did to build this, with newer 5.11 kernel, once Alyssa and Icecream95 get around to some of the hinted-at optimizations for mali g52.

Am a bit curious why Frank and the Khadas team havenā€™t released a 5.10 kernel like yours, since the finally-working panfrost is such a huge advantage.

It does seem to require a current mesa build though.

Morrowind, sadly is too slow in scenes with 100-140k triangles. Anything under 100k is pretty playable. Supertuxkart manages playable framerates up to around 140k triangles, as long as the per-pixel lighting is disabled (graphics quality <3)

@clort76 I documented a way to build the images online with github actions :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
look to here for the instructions:

if you even needed, I can help add some cron functionality to the script if you wanted nightly builds with the latest kernel, and also 5.11 hasnā€™t been released yet in fenix as far as I am concerned, the image I got yesterday was still with 5.10ā€¦

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@clort76 We donā€™t release a image with 5.10-rc6. But you can build wiht fenix , the mainline kernel is 5.10-rc6 now .

Following the comments in panfrost discussion, I donā€™t think we should expect smooth pointer motion during high gpu load or significant performance improvements until summer 2021 at earliest.

As it stands, the Electr1 5.10 kernel + current mesa has been stable for me, even pushing GPU far beyond its capabilities with openMW.