pillepalle Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Hey guys, I was wondering why the Browsers doesnt support H/W Acceleration, now i found out its because the Mali Driver is outdated. I installed also Chromium and forced it to use the GPU, well at least it trys but i got a bunch of errors. Is there a way to add a new Driver? Tried also to compile it myself but i was never that deep into linux and never had to compile drivers, here are the sources: http://malideveloper.arm.com/resources/drivers/open-source-mali-utgard-gpu-linux-kernel-drivers/ I think the current Kernel uses a horrible outdated r3p0 Version and a new one is r7p0, at least r4p0 is needed which should work with Chromium and finally add H/W Acceleration. Or is it not possible because of: Note that these components are not a complete driver stack. To build a functional OpenGL ES or OpenVG driver you need access to the full source code of the Mali GPU DDK, which is provided under the standard ARM commercial licence to all Mali GPU customers. For a complete integration of the Mali GPU DDK with the X11 environment refer to the Integration Guide supplied with the Mali GPU DDK. If someone knows how to compile it and load it i would be thankful Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkaiser Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 H/W Acceleration What do you mean by that? Which sort of 'acceleration' are you talking about? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pillepalle Posted January 8, 2017 Author Share Posted January 8, 2017 By H/W Accleration i mean: (its on my xeon machine) What i need is just Video Decoding also Scrolling and things would be faster if also the other things would be enabled. At the current state everything is rendered in Software and thats why the Browser is a bit laggy. With Chromium its a bit faster, maybe better use of the cores or so. Just Starting takes a bit more time then Firefox. The Main problem is that Firefox and Chromium are rendering in Software Mode which is slow. When i start it via the terminal with forcing it to use the GPU, sometimes i got messages like "failing to start the GPU Process". But i found in the oDroid Community they got it working: http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=8267 They are using a Mali-450 or also a Mali-400 , but should be the same driver. Maybe the devs from odroid can help out? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkaiser Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 What i need is just Video Decoding So you're looking at the wrong engine. Mali is only about 3D acceleration here (and maybe some 2D effects), only WebGL would be faster with working Mali drivers. It's the usual 'GPU' misunderstanding. Chromium (and the whole x86 world) use GPU for everything related to graphics while the Mali GPU means only 3D. Just read through this here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/2841-can-h3-or-h5-support-multiple-different-tvout-and-hdmi-outputs/?p=22562 And while Mali400 or 450 might be present in the SoCs used on some ODROID boards the engines that do 2D acceleration and video decoding are totally different there so this won't help that much. Also you need not just the kernel drivers but also userspace 'blobs' and they have either a non-redistributable license, are of the wrong kind (X11 vs. framebuffer) or simply don't match the kernel version. Apart from that you gain almost nothing with the single exception of stupid pseudo benchmarks (rotating horses and stuff like that) since there aren't applications around that make use of OpenGL ES (Mali 400 is not OpenGL!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zador.blood.stained Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 They are using a Mali-450 or also a Mali-400 , but should be the same driver. Maybe the devs from odroid can help out? No, kernel side driver goes almost without any changes, only platform related code needs to be updated, which obviously will be different from Odroid stuff. As for userspace binary - its license allows using it only on boards made by Hardkernel, so also useless here. Is there a way to add a new Driver? Yes, in theory. r6p0 userspace binaries with proper redistributable license + r6p0 kernel side driver + mali DRM driver + X11 armsoc driver + some work to combine all this stuff... but AFAIK nobody here is interested to do so much work for the legacy kernel, and mainline kernel doesn't have a proper video output driver yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pillepalle Posted January 8, 2017 Author Share Posted January 8, 2017 Oh! Thanks for the explanation! Yep benchmarks are senseless, i dont need glxgears or rotating horses with more FPS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lvmc Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 @tkaiser, I little bit off-topic, but do you know where we can find drivers for Mali T8? I mean the ones for OpenCL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkaiser Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 do you know where we can find drivers for Mali T8? I mean the ones for OpenCL. Nope, no idea. Out of curiosity: What's the use case? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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