FriendlyELEC-Forum

First, let me commend you on an excellent product!

Second, I am interested in finding out how (and if) the hardware acceleration differs between the different distros. I hope that someone can help me with this.

Question 1: Do I understand correct that ONLY the following distros are hardware accelerated?

• rk3588-XYZ-debian-bullseye-minimal-6.1-arm64-YYYYMMDD.img.gz bullseye Debian 11 Desktop, Xfce desktop, no pre-installed recommended software, supports HW acceleration

• rk3588-XYZ-debian-bullseye-desktop-6.1-arm64-YYYYMMDD.img.gz bullseye Debian 11 Desktop, Xfce desktop, pre-installed mpv, smplayer and chromium brower, supports HW acceleration

• rk3588-XYZ-ubuntu-focal-desktop-6.1-arm64-YYYYMMDD.img.gz focal Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop, LXQT desktop, pre-installed mpv, smplayer and chromium brower, supports HW acceleration

• rk3588-XYZ-ubuntu-jammy-x11-desktop-arm64-YYYYMMDD.img.gz jammy Ubuntu 22.04 with Xubuntu and X11, use Panfrost GPU driver

Question 2: Do all of these have acceleration for all the hardware, or are there some of these distros that differ in WHAT hardware features that are accelerated, and if so, HOW do they differ?

Question 3: Is there NO hardware acceleration in the rest of the distros?

Thank you.

1. Yes, your understanding is mostly correct — those listed distros do support hardware acceleration out of the box, especially for video decoding and GPU-accelerated graphics via the Panfrost driver or proprietary VPU support, depending on the image.
2. There are differences in what’s accelerated:
The Debian Bullseye minimal and desktop images typically use Mali GPU drivers and VPU libraries provided by Rockchip, offering better support for video playback and general GPU acceleration.
The Ubuntu Jammy (X11) version uses the open-source Panfrost driver, which may not yet support full VPU acceleration (like for H.264/H.265 decoding), but works well for GPU-rendered interfaces and light 3D.
Some images may only support 2D acceleration or partial VPU/GPU support depending on driver maturity and whether X11 or Wayland is used.
3. For the rest of the distros (like some headless or server versions), hardware acceleration is either not included, or only partially supported unless manually configured. These versions typically lack pre-installed media players or drivers optimized for multimedia workloads.
If full multimedia performance is essential, I recommend sticking with the distros you listed or checking each distro’s documentation/change log for VPU/GPU driver mentions.