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?
You will need to get drivers from Rockchip (both the user-space and kernel parts). The open source drivers on Mali Developer are only the GPL kernel parts from ARM, and therefore exclude vendor-specific chip integration (such as power management and DVFS).
HTH, Pete
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your quick response.
I'll contact Rockchip and keep you posted.
I also contacted Rockchip and the response I received was:
Sorry， We can't release anything about mali without ARM's permission, even the binary.
So we end up with a vicious cycle of no one claiming responsibility. Unfortunately Linux GPU drivers/support is currently one of the achilles heel for ARM SOC's. Having spent the last few years developing under ARM I can now see why there is renewed interest in the newer generation of low cost Intel SOC's where its possible to get out-of-box GPU (and VPU) support for Linux.
um......
I try to compile Qt5 for rk3288,but Qt5 GUI is depend on opengl .....
Then,I see this, I can't find any method to solve the rk3288 GPU driver....
if you have any suggestion,please tell me ,thank you.
ganggangstyle
Assuming you mean OpenGL ES, then the BSP you got from Rockchip should contain the Mali GPU drivers. If it does not, you need to contact Rockchip and ask if/when they plan to release the binaries for that device.
Kind Regards,
Michael McGeagh
Many thanks for the response Chris, what would be very useful if ARM made this clear to Rockchip (or other licencees ) because I don't feel the message about their ability (and/or responsibility) to distribute is clear.
As a side note, some of our customers initially had high hope of using ARM for the commercial products. The lack (and frustration) of Linux GPU support has meant they moved to x86.
Companies always tend to understand very late, after they lose a lot of their customers because of such issues.
I will keep looking at this issue for a while, then I'll have to move to x86 if I don't achieve any progress.
Hi jasbir,
Thank you for the feedback on you and your customers experience, it is very valuable indeed. Hopefully this is resolved in time.
Thanks,
Chris
They are a licencee, but it's possible there might be some clauses regarding binary distribution which I'm sanity checking... Generally we wouldn't want to stop our partners from supporting their developer communities!
As for claiming responsibility, I completely understand developer frustration around the current model, but the business model is that generally we licence a GPU design, and a reference driver stack, to our licencees. Then downstream of us at the SoC vendor, GPU RTL is synthesized into their SoC design, the kernel driver is integrated into their SoC specific kernel, optionally the userspace is modified (rare, but means vanilla DDK builds from us potentially break other components in a vendor supplied BSP if they have performed some integration with other components), and then binaries etc are (in theory) released downstream with their SoC specific BSP. If that final step isn't being performed, then this is unfortunate for the developer community for that board/SoC, but this is a business decision being made downstream of us (or potentially a licencing issue). We do what we can to help for select boards, but the team responsible for performing the integration and releasing builds are a highly constrained resource, and this often takes time.
Hth,
There is a development board based on the RK3288 called Firefly. This wiki page explains how to build the Linux kernel with the Mali driver r4p1 already integrated, and it might be easy to get it to boot on your platform:
Build Kernel - Firefly wiki
We also have a web page where we publish binary user-side drivers.
It doesn't currently have the Mali-T76x flavours but we're planning to add it for Linux (fbdev and X11) by the end of January.
Guillaume thanks for the update. Just to clarify, the user space drivers that are planned to be delivered are they compatible to run any SOC which has Mali-T76x or are we expected to request these binaries from the Licencee?
The binaries on our website guillaume.tucker mentioned have been tested on the Nexus 10, Samsung Chromebooks, and Arndales. There is a chance that these binaries will work on other platforms, but as we have not tested them, we cannot guarantee that they will work.
Linux is more forgiving than Android, as Android may have more customisations that each separate device may rely on, which isnt part of the generic builds we have in house.
In short, binaries we produce on the website 'may' work on your devices, but they may not, or there may be performance issues or bugs as a result due to incompatibilities in the integration layer which we do not control.
For an official and fully supported binary, the best option is to contact the SoC vendor for their binary.
I hope this helps,
Just to keep you updated.
We plan to release binary userspace drivers for the Firefly board within the next month for both fbdev and X11. These will appear on our malideveloper website in the same location as the current Exynos based drivers live.
Regarding the response from RockChip about not being able to release binaries... this is incorrect and we have contacted RockChip to clarify the terms of contract. They are fully aware and apologise for the miscommunication earlier.
In fact, RockChip plan to release their own drivers for the public for Linux within the next few months, however it will be targeting the TopMetal platform rather than Firefly.
I imagine it wont be too much effort for the community to make those drivers work for Firefly however.
I hope this helps regarding public driver support. If anyone has any further queries, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Hi peba,
Would this also include VPU support for video encoding/decoding via gstreamer ?
You would have to contact Rockchip regarding this, as the VPU in the RK3288 is not ARM's IP, so we have no drivers to release for this.
Note that the driver we are releasing is just the Mali GPU driver, not an entire BSP.
Do you plan to offer a beta or pre-release of your driver blob for interested developers ?
No, the majority of time spent to release these drivers is not in the engineering work, but in the testing and legal. These will still hold true for beta/pre-release candidates so you wouldnt get them much quicker.
To help with your scheduling, the fbdev version should be out this week, with the X11 version to quickly follow.
I hope that helps.
Hello Michael McGeagh,
Thank you very much for the update on Mali T764 GPU support for RK3288.Would this also include VPU support for video encoding/decoding via gstreamer ?
Do you plan to offer a beta or pre-release of your driver blob for interested developers ?It would be useful to start software-integration and end-user tests as early as possible.-early testing could save time and offer better overall customer experience-tests done by the user community could show if your drivers are mature enough forproductive useHow could an interested developer gain access to pre-release blobs ?Any download site available ?
I got one of these new TV boxes which offer dual-boot
Android 4.4 or Ubuntu 14.10. I prefer to use Ubuntu on
this box and this works really well apart from missing VPU/GPU support.Bitkistl: Ugoos UT3 dual boot
This would be another device waiting for MALI 764 drivers:Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A17 CPU Android & Ubuntu Mini PC
Best Regards,
Peter Bauer
http://bitkistl.blogspot.com