I am a member of the JavaFX Embedded team, which I will loosely define as JavaFX using (hopefully) GPU accelerated rendering direct to framebuffer on a Linux distro.
We currently have rendering using 3 different GPU families, but unfortunately Mali is not one of them.
I have 3 different community boards with Mali-400 on them, and have yet to get the satisfaction of a simple GLESv2 app rendering without X11 in the way. Perhaps this is because I am a library guy (not a kernel guy), perhaps it is due to the emphasis on X11 in the distros, perhaps this is because I have not found the right magic incantation.
So I am looking for recommendations for community boards (easily available without NDA), and/or suggestions on what I am missing in setup on the boards I do have.
I have:
Arndale Board-K
Odroid-U3
A20-OlinuXino-Micro
The A20 forums hint that I should be able to get the sunxi dirvers to install/work, but I keep running into kernel/driver mismatches after several iterations.
Thanks in advance.
If you want to render to a framebuffer (as compared to be able to use the Mali GLES drivers) why not pick up an ARM based chromebook? The original Samsung chromebook has a Mali T604. I've use mine quite a bit.
There arm based chromebook 2 by Samsung is about to come out that'll be Mali a T628. I'm sure it'll take a little bit for linux support to catch up, but you can be rest assured that it will.
Any reason why you're interested in framebuffer in particular?
Tom Gall wrote: If you want to render to a framebuffer (as compared to be able to use the Mali GLES drivers)...
Tom Gall wrote:
If you want to render to a framebuffer (as compared to be able to use the Mali GLES drivers)...
You can render to /dev/fb* using the mali gles drivers, it's just a different window system, or rather the absence of one. It's one of the options in our Chromebook guide for example: Graphics and Compute Development on Samsung Chromebook « Mali Developer Center
Tom,
I am looking to use the EGL/GLES -> framebuffer path.
We are trying to avoid the extra overhead of X11, which is the standard way that EGL works. Different vendor/platforms support this in different ways, so it might even be that the problem is one of configuration and non-standard API
The use case for JavaFX on embedded is for full screen applications, so avoiding X11 reduces overhead, but adds startup complexity.
Thanks Chris. Thats two Mali based direct to Framebuffer write ups I have. May have to see about ordering a chromebook.
Hi David,
The chromebook we provide drivers for, but this is not Mali-400 so bear that in mind. We are looking to expand the set of devices we support directly so hopefully this is less of an issue in the future. Odroid-U3 would probably be my pick from your original list, and try and get the simple triangle GLES SDK example running. If you hit any issues, feel free to shout at us here and we will do our best to resolve them with you.
Thanks,
Chris