FriendlyELEC-Forum

Hello,

A few questions please.

1. Is the malit864 GPU supported under any of the linux distributions?
2. How can I test the GPU driver performance?

It seems the CPU is doing too much work when rendering a simple 3D object.

I have the same frustration. It appears the Mali T864 support by Rockchip is very poor.
I might try the Panfrost driver. Right now I'm using the xorg fbdev driver and the llvm meda driver. It's a little faster than
the terrible Mali Blobs but it's still not fast enough for good opencv performance, bzflag is 12 frames per second, armangand is 12 frames /sec. Not a gaming mini PC that's for sure. I modified and recompiled Plex Media Player to use DRI/FBDEV for video out. I can get 1080p with no dropped frames. I can't play video on my 2k monitor.. it's a slide show.

My confidence in Rockchip right now is very low. They don't answer emails. They don't seem to be making headway.
Friendly Elec's hands appear to be tied because Rockchip Support sucks. It's too bad. On paper the NanoT4-PC4 has great specs, but the poor Linux support


I may end up staying with the NUC for my designs since ARM does not have a solid open MALI driver and library.

I can tell yo my NUC Hades Canyon is EXTREMELY fast with BIONIC Beaver and my TiNKERBOARD can play 3D games better than my NANOPC-T4. It's too bad, I really like the performance of the NVME on the NANOPC-T4 and the high speed USBC. Rockchip dropped the ball when it comes to GPU support. It's terrible! Also on Android NO NVME support.

you can get this info from wiki - for example, here
- Linux distro with drivers http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index. ... dlyDesktop
- how to test in GL ES http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index. ... _OpenGL_ES

T860x4 is mid/ low performance GPU - don't expect a miracle from it

jerryn wrote:
but it's still not fast enough for good opencv performance, bzflag is 12 frames per second, armangand is 12 frames /sec.

some other Rk3399 boards(like firefly rk3399) have a bit better performance in opencv/opencl, but this is GPU hardware limitation in general - it too narrow(T864 it's a T860x4 pipelines) and low frequency/memory/IO performance.

for OpenCV I may suggest to use ARM Mali G7x based hardware ( Kirin 960+, Exynos 9 series) - performance 200-400 GFlop at fp32 comparable with low\mid end laptops with Intel integrated graphics.

I see that in Debian Linux, the MaliGraphics installation looks so:

Installation

Ensure non-free is available (testing or unstable at this time), then install the driver package for your GPU flavour and windowing system. i.e. one of:

apt install mali-t76x-x11-driver
apt install mali-t76x-wayland-driver
apt install mali-t76-fbdev-driver

Note that not every combination of GPU and windowing system is available, because we can only package what ARM release.

But, at itself in Ubuntu-Bionic it is not possible to turn off program rendering of Cinnamon:

pi@NanoPC-T4:~$ inxi -Fxz
System: Host: NanoPC-T4 Kernel: 4.4.143 aarch64 bits: 32 gcc: 6.4.0
Desktop: Cinnamon 3.6.7 (Gtk 2.24.32) Distro: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Machine: No /sys/class/dmi; using dmidecode: root required for dmidecode
CPU: 6 core (-MCP-) bmips: arch: ARM
clock speeds: max: 1416 MHz 1: 1416 MHz 2: 1416 MHz 3: 1416 MHz
4: 1416 MHz 5: 1416 MHz 6: 1416 MHz
Graphics: Card: Failed to Detect Video Card!
Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.3 ) driver: modesetting
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 7.0, 128 bits)
version: 3.3 Mesa 18.2.8 Direct Render: Yes
Audio: Card-1 realtek driver: rt5651-codec port: realtek_rt5651-
Card-2 rockchip driver: hdmi port: rockchip_hdmi
Card-3 ROCKCHIP driver: SPDIF port: ROCKCHIP_SPDIF
Card-4 USB Audio Device driver: USB-Audio
Card-5 C-Media driver: USB Audio usb-ID: 005-004
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.4.143
Network: Card: Failed to Detect Network Card!
Drives: HDD Total Size: 240.1GB (4.4% used)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 model: STORAGE_DEVICE size: 240.1GB
ID-2: /dev/mmcblk1 model: N/A size: 15.6GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 15G used: 9.8G (70%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/mmcblk1p7
Sensors: None detected - is lm-sensors installed and configured?
Info: Processes: 238 Uptime: 1 min Memory: 562.5/3858.1MB
Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 7.4.0
Client: Shell (bash 4.4.191) inxi: 2.3.56

labuzhskiy wrote:
OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 7.0, 128 bits)
version: 3.3 Mesa 18.2.8 Direct Render: Yes

It's a software OpenGL, so you GPU not utilized.

How to correct?

labuzhskiy wrote:
How to correct?

It's not clear a reason of issue on you system. I just leave few links, which can help you:

- Original driver source - it's ARM web-site with user-space drivers - you may install it by hands (and need to enable ARM Mali in kernel too).

- For Armbian exist a media script, which install everything automatically - probably, it will not work on Debain, but due to similarity between Debian and Ubuntu it's should not be hard to used it on Debian too.

Or just simply use Armbian, which is Ubuntu 18.04 LTS based. or FriendlyElec distro, which come with all drivers included

Armbian and Media script works fine. i.e. 1080p on Youtube. Previous version of Friendly OS worked, but they broke it in the late May release. Both OS suffer from Alsa Mixer bug and some twiddling using the M key to enable channels is required to get sound working.

Friendly OS does boot in 2secs. Armbian can be booted off EMMC and ran on SATA / USB3 SSD. It takes 3 or 4 seconds. Both seem to be neck and neck in performance for what I use this card for - Browsing, video, music, email etc.

ayaromenok wrote:

labuzhskiy wrote:
How to correct?

*snip*

Or just simply use Armbian, which is Ubuntu 18.04 LTS based. or FriendlyElec distro, which come with all drivers included

Problem is that FE distribution, once you update, your drivers go poof.