Mali hardware acceleration on ubuntu on Chromebook

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.

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