gpupoor

Thanks @KhanhDTP, this is great. I tried to stick with approaches that have made their way into official channels, but I'm happy to include because it's very cool to have a full working path identified (B2).

I think I understood your setup but please let me know if I missed anything.

Again, not sure where/how the best place to keep track of this is so in the absence of anything better I'll use the PR, but happy to migrate to another location.

Edit: I'm not sure how to format nicely here... so I updated the related PR. That said, this probably isn't the best reference location for this. In any case, posting in case helpful for anyone else. If it's useful for the project to better community (and potentially automate) some of this I'm happy to get involved, but here's what I've got for now:
 
There are fundamentally two driver paths for RK3588:
libMali path - Enables NPU for ML inference, basic GPU only Panthor path - Enables full GPU acceleration, no NPU
Within each path, you can choose headless or desktop (XFCE/GNOME), but:
libMali + desktop = slow rendering (software only) Panthor + desktop = smooth rendering (hardware accelerated)
Key insight: The NPU and GPU hardware are separate, but the software drivers conflict. You must choose which accelerator matters more for your use case.

Additional constraint:
Kernel matters - NPU only works on 6.1 vendor kernel. Mainline 6.12 has no NPU support but best GPU drivers.
 
This creates a matrix of ~6 viable configurations, each optimized for different workloads (production ML, ML development, desktop, latest kernel, etc).

More detailed breakdown: 
https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8979#issuecomment-3587135022
 

I have nothing to complain about.
glmark2-wayland-odroid-m2.log
vkmark-wayland-odroid-m2.log

Yes. It is only enabled / working with 6.1 and desktop (Gnome) builds. For mainline based, perhaps 6.18.y ...

Thank you @KhanhDTP. I think I have a pretty good handle on how (and your post on that thread was in particular very helpful, thank you). 

It looks like a lot of people here are desktop optimized. My plan is headless, so expectation is 25.11.1 / 6.1 and libMali route but with RKNN (XFCE only for occasional desktop, Gnome is too hungry, XFCE + X11 + software rendering is fine on rare occasions I'd need it). 

I think the question I was trying to ask is more along the lines of understanding what to expect for the default, and if it made sense to enable one of the drivers by default, but I'm realizing there are proprietary dependencies and enough obscure use cases that this gets more challenging.

Thanks to everyone for all of the thoughts, hard to imagine navigating all of this without your contributions.