Hi,
I'm establishing a startup company and decided to use ARM devices as thin clients for my company's VDI solution. I have recently bought an RK3288-based device which uses a MALI-764 GPU. The device has Ubuntu 14.04 installed, but it is missing the 3D Hardware Acceleration functionality due to missing MALI 764 drivers.
However, I found the drivers available on Developer.
My question is: How can I compile these drivers to gain full 3D hardware acceleration on my linux-based device?
I think Rockchip's new processor will be released before we get an X11 driver for RK3288.
It took almost 10 months for the user-space driver to get released.
Intel devices have driver support straight out of the box, don't need to wait a year for something that might happen.
I hope ARM can prove us wrong and manufacturers like Rockchip don't need to spend another 6 months optimizing the X11 driver to get it in a working state.
Hi Ryan,
To help clarify the situation...
ARM design the GPU, and license this intellectual property to SoC designers who then integrate it into their SoC.
In addition to this IP, we also provide a software proprietary driver for the GPU.
This source is then modified and integrated into the SoC's kernel and BSPs by the designers, not ARM. This is because we do not control the other aspects of the SoC nor the BSP.
Comparing the speed in which Intel release drivers, is not a comparison with ARM, but a comparison with RockChip (in this instance). If you truely believe RockChip should have provided driver support sooner than they have done, then you should really contact RockChip, not us. Rockchip have our driver sources, including the components for X11 already, and have done since the very beginning. We cannot force them to release drivers however, as this is completely up to them.
In addition to the above statement, we see that the community want driver availability as soon as possible, and have decided to take it upon ourselves to release generic binary drivers that are compatible with the more popular development platforms out there, to help enable and drive the Mali ecosystem.
Releasing this requires not only engineering effort to make the changes (which is by far the shortest step in this process) but also vigorous testing of the binary to make sure performance is optimal and it is as bug free as possible, with the features required. This can take some time to go through.
During this process, we also have to go through legal approval to distribute the binary, and this can sometimes delay things further.
I sincerely do apologise that you have had a bad experience so far waiting for either Rockchip's official drivers, or our generic drivers to be release.
Due to the size of the team working on this, we cannot commit to a release date, so I can only ask you to be patient a little longer.
We do hope to release this soon, and it is one of the tasks we are actively working on (among many other things)
Thank you for your understanding.
Kind Regards,
Michael McGeagh