Is there a guide anywhere on getting hardware acceleration working properly on the Samsung Chromebook 2 or the Hardkernel ODroid XU3? These devices use the Mali T628. I have followed the guide at Graphics and Compute Development on Samsung Chromebook - Mali Developer Center Mali Developer Center , however the performance is lackluster. My suspicion is with the armsoc DDX driver. I believe that the guide was written with regards to the older Samsung Chromebook that used the Mali 400.
es2info shows that the system is not using mesa software rendering. I obtain about 200fps with es2gears, and when the window is enlarged, the framerate drops to about 30fps. The biggest problem is with 2D performance. I realize that the Mali devices are not 2D, but that the driver should be passing on the 2D operations to 3D via Glamor or the like. Moving windows such as a web browser around on the desktop results in very poor performance and user interface latency.
Is there a different xf86 driver that should be used with the T628?
Hi jwestervelt,
We are already investigating the possibility to adapt our instructions for the newer Samsung Chromebook 2 devices, including any binary driver changes that may be needed.
Please bear with us as we continue investigating this.
We will notify in this discussion as soon as possible when we are ready to release.
Unfortunately I cannot commit to an ETA for you, so please check back periodically.
Kind Regards,
Michael McGeagh
Michael,
Thank you for the update. Let me know if you need any testing assistance. I am primarily a Gentoo Linux user, and am currently working on getting a set of kernel patches together to add support for the Chromebook2 to the HMP (GTS) enabled kernels that Linaro put out. Seems as if the device tree source files for the Chromebook are absent in that branch. I'd be happy to test the revised Mali instructions against an upgraded kernel in case anyone wants to upgrade from 3.8.11. I'd also like to use the revised as a starting point for writing a similar guide for Gentoo, Arch, and Debian.
Jason
I see that the guide has been updated to include the XE503C32 device. I followed through with the guide and managed to get X11 up, but the 2D performance is absolutely horrid, to the point that it is not useable. Is there some setup that is required to get decent X performance in 2D? Dragging a window and getting less than 1FPS is pretty bad.
The window manager you are using probably does not have a GLES backend, so is falling back to software rendering and horrible perf. There are some GLES enabled window managers available, but the packaged versions tend to depend on mesa. If you can work around this by somehow not installing that dependency, or building from source, etc, then this should give better perf. X11 GLES applications should run with expected perf.
Hth,
Chris
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