Mali GPU Drivers buggy

[ByteAtATime]

Hi all, recently I installed the Mali GPU Drivers from the instructions on the official Armbian website. I have Armbian 23.02.2 Jammy installed, with KDE Plasma desktop. I found two problems:

 

1. The mouse flickers when I move it. This happens on both XFCE and Plasma (X11)

2. Every once in a while, the Plasma panels freeze and I have to reboot my OPI to get it to work. This also happens if I right-click on it and press "Enter Edit Mode". If I don't do that, it freezes randomly (afaik). This affects both the panels and the background (panels don't update, can't interact, cannot right-click).

 

Does anyone know of any solutions to this? Thanks!

[Werner]

Panfork is under heavy development/cutting edge so issues are to be expected. Alternative would be to use Rockchip proprietary binary blobs but they seem not to work very well either. On the bottom line nothing Armbian can fix (easily).

[royk]

Did you also update the kernel?

About the flickering cursor, I've seen that the cursor has been moved from hw to software because some had problems with a disappearing cursor.

Maybe it's because of the resolution/refresh rate you're using?

[ByteAtATime]

Does Armbian have any plans to create their own Mali drivers? The current ones seem to have a lot of bugs, and also don't support OpenGL ES 3.0 as far as I can see, even though the G610 supports up to 3.2.

[jernej]

2 hours ago, ByteAtATime said:

Does Armbian have any plans to create their own Mali drivers?

GPU drivers are one of the most complex drivers possible. Basically, you have to write compiler in mesa and task scheduler in kernel. So no.

[martivo]

I am having the same occasional freeze issue(mouse won't move, all windows frozen in place, movie audio plays but picture won't move), but I found out that unplugging the HDMI and plugging it back in seems to recover desktop withour rebooting. I have only tried this a few times so far since I only realized it recently.

Can someone confirm that it solves the freeze issue for them too?

[Efe Çetin]

I can confirm i've had the same problem 

[royk]

I did also have these problems at the beginning, but I don't have seen them for about a month I think. No sure what made the difference,  I thought it was because there were some changes made in the drivers/kernel code.

I changed some settings in the kernel config, like disabled most of the debugging options, default scheduler at performance, timer at 1000hz, set the compiler at performance and some other settings with the scheduler. Maybe this fixed the lockups? Although this probably won't make a difference for the behavior of the cursor, or could the timer clock at 1000hz have reduced the flickering?

There are some minor problems like night light doesn't always work immediately but does start after I turn on the receiver or reboot the tv.