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?
The older Samsung Chromebook actually uses Mali T604. I installed the Mali binary drivers on Ubuntu and noticed a big 3D perf improvement over Mesa, but not quite the jump I was expecting.
I haven't gotten my hands on a Samsung Chromebook 2 yet but the mechanics of getting the OSS kernel driver and closed source binary blob installed and running on either Chromebook 2 or Chromebook should be very similar, especially if you're using the same ARM Ubuntu distribution.
I suspect there's a perf issue somewhere in the software stack as ChromeOS 3D (and 2D) perf is actually pretty decent.