Mali hardware acceleration on ubuntu on Chromebook

While I have upgraded to 14.10 and installed e17 with EGL intact, found the compositor works great in software mode (even better in 14.10 than in 14.04)

I found chromium-browser --user-data-dir=./chrome --use-gl=egl and Smooth Scroll in chrome://flags which seems to do a lot better without the compositor than with it, but enabling it gets me a flickery mouse cursor and

I can't help but feel something is missing from this tutorial.  Like I am missing the bigger picture.  Maybe I need to start another thread, but, is there wayland support?  e19?  Aren't these from Samsung, and renound for EGL features?  You'd think there would be a single build script for all of this in one fell swoop.  Instead I'm contending with eina not found.

I'm trying to build it now, from nineteen.sh which I found on ubuntuhandbook.org.  I think I missed something more fundamental though, forget any compositor, once I think I had configured EGL support securely, the performance of fairly simple things (I think?) like smooth opaque window transform in the default openbox performed just abysmally.  They seemed to be not using whatever kind of acceleration we have enabled here.

Then glTexImage2D errors coming out of chromium, not sure if that is avoidable or not.  I invite you all to try along with me and report back when your experiences have differed from mine.

Maybe I should end here and think about opening another thread, I did achieve the mali hardware acceleration as promised FWIW so

Hi yebyen,

I think you've strayed further than we have in our testing we typically pull X up to the point that we can run windowed/fullscreen GLES apps, but that's about it. Maybe someone from our BSP team can comment further on what should/shouldn't work.

yebyen wrote:

I think I missed something more fundamental though, forget any compositor, once I think I had configured EGL support securely, the performance of fairly simple things (I think?) like smooth opaque window transform in the default openbox performed just abysmally.  They seemed to be not using whatever kind of acceleration we have enabled here.

I think most window managers etc tend to use a GL backend, which Mali does not support, it supports GLES. This means they tend to revert to software rendering, which explains the poor perf of window transforms. GLES apps should still run at expected perf. There are a few GLES window managers out there to my knowledge, but you would probably need to pull them in without pulling in the mesa libs they almost always depend upon!

Hth,

Chris

OK, so I am not seeing anything that I'm not expected or supposed to be seeing.  Good.

I did not know about chromium-mali-opengles from the Bodhi project.  Good tip also.  Thanks.  I still have high hopes for E19, the build script takes a decent while and is for trusty (14.04) while I already moved on with do-release-upgrade -d to utopic (14.10), so I haven't succeeded at building it yet as some minor changes as expected are needed from the trusty script to build it from git.

Of course this is totally out of scope for this thread, but I may now also try KDE from your advice.  E19 had a stable release in September with "full wayland support" (which I may have misread as "much improved/fully supported OpenGLES compositor implementation".)

I had indeed installed mesa as you suspected, it was pretty easy to move the libraries out of the way once I found the specific list of libs I shouldn't have been linking with (and which versions were asked for by name in the software I was trying to use with now broken library links).  Not sure how to build glmark2-es2 or es2_info/es2gears, they pulled in mesa when I installed mesa-utils-extra, the only libraries that seemed to be in conflict were the ones in /root/mali and those are "drop-in replacement" for the es2 libs of mesa.

Thanks for confirmations, I think you addressed all of the remaining oddities I was seeing, and everything is now as it should be expected to be!  The tutorial should really take you all the way up to running (literally anything at all) with acceleration, because it ends at "type startx" and from what you've told me, there is nothing even remotely accelerated on or near the screen when you finally get to this point.  My natural inclination once learning that plain GL is not supported was to install es2gears to see if it's really working, and that was exactly the wrong thing to do because it necessarily pulls in mesa.

Maybe that's too much garden path thinking, and you want that maybe your target audience should really be able to go on the forums and figure this out.  I understand you are promoting Mali to devs, not Samsung Chromebook to end users, but nobody else can provide the drivers and even regular users need drivers sometimes bonus points to the thread you linked because you all mentioned "feh"

Works for me now.  Hopefully this thread can also help someone else get here, too.

Hi yebyen,

Thanks for the feedback, glad it's all working now. Enough people have tripped over the mesa thing that we should address it in the guide, and I agree we could do more in the guide to confirm a working setup. I'll pass this on to the relevant people.

nobody else can provide the drivers and even regular users need drivers sometimes

Strictly speaking there are people downstream of us that could do this (Samsung/Google in this case) but supporting Linux environments tends to be quite far down the priority list. We do this in an effort to provide an easily accessible, relatively cheap development platform to those wishing to develop GLES applications on Mali hardware, but we're by no means the gatekeepers to providing such support!

bonus points to the thread you linked because you all mentioned "feh"

Are you a dev?

Cheers,

Chris

...

nobody else can provide the drivers and even regular users need drivers sometimes

Strictly speaking there are people downstream of us that could do this (Samsung/Google in this case) but supporting Linux environments tends to be quite far down the priority list. We do this in an effort to provide an easily accessible, relatively cheap development platform to those wishing to develop GLES applications on Mali hardware, but we're by no means the gatekeepers to providing such support!

bonus points to the thread you linked because you all mentioned "feh"

Are you a dev?

Cheers,

Chris

I am very computer sometimes, others not so much.  It's true that there is not much help from Samsung or Google on this front!  I was very glad to find the drivers here, even more now that I start to see how they are put together.

So far EFL compiled from git, the biggest hurdle is that -lGLESv2 and -lEGL are both stubs, missing everything you would normally expect to find in them with the actual functionality implemented in libmali.so, so everything that links either of those needs to -lmali as well or undefined symbol glTexImage2D, etc.  Caught at configure time building EFL.  That is why chromium from ubuntu doesn't access the acceleration features too, I'd assume, because it doesn't link in libmali.so.

I think it will work now, but there's an hour of compiling left maybe or more before I see, and it's time for bed now!

Kingdon