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GPU acceleration

Added by Thomas Frohwein about 10 years ago

I have recently installed Replicant 4.2 on my Note 2 (n7100) and it works pretty well - great job, Paul! The only thing that I miss somewhat is the GPU acceleration. While the phone is pretty responsive overall, sliding through the launcher or scrolling webpages with a lot of pictures is a little sluggish at times. I have checked out limadriver.org and tried to build this free driver for Mali GPUs, but it seems to depend on proprietary libraries for building (e.g. libMali.so - correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't find it on the phone and it doesn't seem to be free!).

Maybe Paul knows what the status of free GPU drivers is? Is limadriver a consideration at all?

Or does someone know a way to speed up the interface, maybe a more responsive launcher?


Replies (8)

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Paul Kocialkowski about 10 years ago

Thanks for your feedback!

Maybe Paul knows what the status of free GPU drivers is? Is limadriver a consideration at all?

Lima actually requires the proprietary libMali.so currently, because it uses its shader/vertex compiler. Connor is working on a free compiler for that and I'm confident it'll bring good results at some point in the future (it's not there yet). This approach was chosen by Luc so that he could concentrate on purely writing the driver part and that seems to work well so far, since Lima with the proprietary compiler is already giving good results.

The current status of Lima is that Luc is working on the mesa integration (I attended his talk about the state of Lima at FOSDEM 2014). When that is out and we have a free compiler, we'll be able to include it in Replicant through mesa.

Or does someone know a way to speed up the interface, maybe a more responsive launcher?

Yes, that's one of the possible ways to improve the general speed of devices. I'm going to work on these graphics-related issues at some point in the future, I already have a few ideas in mind, but I'm way busy with other things currently.

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by My Self about 9 years ago

The current status of Lima is that Luc is working on the mesa integration (I attended his talk about the state of Lima at FOSDEM 2014). When that is out and we have a free compiler, we'll be able to include it in Replicant through mesa.

Exactly one year later, I kindly wanted to aks, if there are any news about the lima driver project?

I've made a little GPU chipset overview of the Replicant supported devices 'GPU_chipsets.pdf' with open driver replacement suggestions.
Probably someone else knows anything more about the progress of one or more driver replacements?

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Paul Kocialkowski about 9 years ago

Exactly one year later, I kindly wanted to aks, if there are any news about the lima driver project?

No driver is ready yet.

I've made a little GPU chipset overview of the Replicant supported devices 'GPU_chipsets.pdf' with open driver replacement suggestions.

The Galaxy Tabs are using a PowerVR series 5 GPU as well (OMAP4 chip).

Probably someone else knows anything more about the progress of one or more driver replacements?

I am well aware of the state of the art of free graphics drivers on embedded devices. Apart from the Tegra K1 and Qualcomm chips (Adreno), there is nothing that we can use yet.

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Grim Kriegor about 7 years ago

Any news regarding the state of the Lima project?

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Wolfgang Wiedmeyer almost 7 years ago

I created a wiki page to summarize the current status (including Lima): GraphicsResearch

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Jeremy Rand over 6 years ago

Phoronix reports [1] that Qiang Yu from AMD has started a new free Mali-400 driver [2]. Seems to be actively developed; last commit was 6 hours ago. Would this be worth mentioning on the GraphicsResearch wiki page?

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mali-400-New-Open-Source
[2] https://github.com/yuq/mesa-lima

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Wolfgang Wiedmeyer over 6 years ago

Jeremy Rand wrote:

Phoronix reports [1] that Qiang Yu from AMD has started a new free Mali-400 driver [2]. Seems to be actively developed; last commit was 6 hours ago. Would this be worth mentioning on the GraphicsResearch wiki page?

It's definitely worth mentioning! Feel free to add it! The work still looks promising. I'm very happy that Qiang started working on it and I had contacted him some time ago to thank him.

RE: GPU acceleration - Added by Jeremy Rand over 6 years ago

Is Chai at all relevant to Replicant? Seems to be primarily aimed at the Mali T760 (which is what's in the C201 Chromebook), I'm not sure how much overlap exists between that and the Replicant-supported devices.

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