Vulkan Driver?

[ArmBoy1988]

Has anyone seen this?  The claims there is a Vulkan driver now:

 

https://github.com/Bleach665/Mali610Vulkan

 

Can't confirm.

[Arkadi]

https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/888

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/panvk-v10-support.html

 

Rockchip version segfaults for me (on Ubuntu) but I didn't spent any further time looking why.

[elvis]

Mesa3D's PanVK / Panthor driver is half of this.  The other half is support in the Linux kernel:

 

https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md

 

Specifically the "Display Controller (VOP)" ("VOP" = Video Out Processor).  The HDMI PHY and bridge are slated for kernel 6.13-rc1.  Without those, the HMDI controller can't send a picture.  There are more portions too for 4K / 8K support, audio support, etc.  But at the very least with the PHY and bridge working, I think that enables native kernel + Mesa support to get a picture and use Vulkan. 

Kernel 6.12 was released today.  The 6.13 development cycle should begin soon, although there's often a break over Christmas and New Year, so I'm expecting something early 2025 for a full working solution. 

[elvis]

Collabora blogpost from Dec 20 confirms kernel 6.13 contains the necessary HDMI/VOP portions:

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/rockchip-rk3588-upstream-support-progress-future-plans.html

Code commits as well as blog comments suggest that specific resolution/refresh support will be a bit limited to start with, but that's being worked on for future releases.  Likewise CEC and V4L2 support is being worked on and will appear later in 2025 (not necessary for just getting a picture though, but useful for people looking to put rk3588s SoCs into media center or streaming server builds). 

At time of posting, 6.13-rc5 is the current release candidate, so I suspect 6.13 will be released within a few weeks.  I'm seeing a few people building 6.13-rc kernels for various rk3588s boards with some success (Panthor+HDMI seemingly producing a picture), so that's a positive sign for the upcoming release. 

[elvis]

I've built 6.13-rc5 kernel and kernel-dtb using the Armbian build tools, and pushed that to my Orange Pi5 running Armbian Bookworm that itself shipped with the 6.12 kernel straight from the download page.  I installed kernel/headers/dtb packages with dpkg and rebooted, and it worked without issue.

The kernel enables the VOP, and I can get 1080p120 and up to 2160p30 resolutions working on my 4K TV via HDMI.  2160p60 doesn't show up as an option, but I'm unsure if that's a limit of the current VOP driver, or my cable.  (There's talk on the mailing list about more work needing to be done for certain resolutions to be supported).  I'm running X11 currently (default from the Armbian image).  I'll try Wayland at some point.

I've compiled in Mesa from git-main for the Panfrost drivers, and Vulkan seems to work pretty well.  I get a few odd colours randomly here and there, but I assume these early bugs will sort themselves out in time.  I initially didn't get OpenGL working, but that's because I forgot to compile in the drm-shim tools in Mesa.  With those compiled and installed, OpenGL works fine too without the need to do any LD_PRELOAD stuff in the Mesa documentation (I think that's outdated info from the 24.x tree), and is quite fast.   Simple OpenGL-display/scale things like MAME can happily achieve 400% speed output, and aren't being capped by the GPU's bandwidth like they are on some older SoCs.  The Mali G610 is a pretty nice GPU, I have to say.

Zink isn't working so well just yet, but also I haven't tried limiting the OpenGL version it's attempting yet.  I probably need to pull that right back to match the features available in the current Panfrost Vulkan implementation.  Although the Panfrost Gallium driver seems to work well enough for OpenGL, so that's nice.

I'm quite impressed with how well this works even with code that's full of "testing only" warnings.   I think across a variety of games and emulators I've had one crash so far.  Pretty exciting to see this board fully supported by mainline kernel+mesa finally.   Seeing GameCube emulation running at full speed with Vulkan on this little SoC is really cool. 

Kernel 6.13 was released officially yesterday, so hopefully we'll see this all appear in the "edge" Armbian packaging soon.

[Gustavo M]

@elvis, Care to make a step-by-step on how you did all that? I've got a Orange pi 5 max and I'm struggling really hard on making it work properly -- everything feels really broken on my end.