gpu News - Page 28 of 30 - CNX Software

February 19, 2013February 19, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 37 Comments

Ubuntu Linaro 12.11 with 2D/3D Mali-400 GPU Acceleration on ODROID-X Development Board

A few days ago, Hardkernel released the first version of Ubuntu 12.11 (Linaro) with Mali-400 GPU support for their ODROID boards (ODROID-X/X2, ODROID-U/U2). This is still WIP (Work in Progress), but this is one of the few boards together with Pandaboard, Origen and Snowball that can support 2D/3D GPU acceleration in Ubuntu Quantal. Since I have an ODROID-X development board, I decided to give it a try. There are different ways to install it. I chose the way that is most convenient for me (LCD display instead of HDMI), and likely to yield more performance (eMMC instead of SD Card). The current installation instructions to eMMC are extremely cumbersome and you have to go through 5 main steps: Install Android (yes, seriously) in the eMMC Install Ubuntu in the SD Card Install Ubuntu to the eMMC Upgrade Ubuntu to the latest version Install the Mali drivers In this post I’m […]

February 14, 2013July 21, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Open ARM GPU Drivers FOSDEM 2013 Video and Call to ARM Management

As I previously wrote, FOSDEM organizers are slowly uploading FOSDEM 2013 videos. One of the most interesting talk “Open ARM GPU Drivers” is now available. I’ve also uploaded it to YouTube (embedded below) to give it more exposure. Luc Verhaegen has also written a recent blog post entitled “Hey ARM!” where he announces the release of the modified source for Quake 3 Arena demo, and asks ARM to join them in making an open source driver. Open ARM GPU Drivers @ FOSDEM2013 This session covers the following key points: Problem – Binary drivers are mainly designed to run in Android, and it’s very difficult to have proper GPU drivers for Linux, and companies are not interested to release open source drivers or even just documentation, as they are not convinced it will benefit them in any way. Legal – This is actually the main issue, as open sourcing existing driver […]

February 7, 2013May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Quake 3 Arena Demo Using Lima Driver is (Slightly) Faster than Mali-400 Binary Driver

As mentioned previously, Luc Verhaegen was to give a talk about the status of Lima driver (reverse-engineered Mali-200/400 GPU driver), as well as other GPU open source implementation, at FOSDEM 2013. This is now done, and part of the talk included a demo of Quake 3 Arena (q3a timedemo) running on tablet featuring AllWinner A10 SoC (Cortex A8 @ 1Ghz, Mali-400MP1 GPU @ 320 Mhz, and DDR3 memory @ 360MHz), and a 1024×600 LCD. The fact it works is already a great achievement in itself, but this demo runs at 47.2fps with Lima driver (limare), whereas it can be rendered at 46.2fps using the binary driver. In his blog, Luc also explains that apart from being 2% faster, it also uses 3% less cpu than the binary driver! Take that binary blobs! There’s still more work to do however, as this Quake 3 Arena port is not playable yet for 2 […]

February 1, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

A Selection of FOSDEM 2013 Events

FOSDEM is a 2-day (or 3 if you include Friday beer event) event where over 5,000 members of open source communities meet, share ideas and collaborate. It’s free to attend, and there’s no registration, so you just show up to attend. FOSDEM 2013 takes place on Feb 2-3 (yep, this week-end) in Brussels There are 7 main tracks where sessions are organized: Operating systems Open source challenges Security Janson Beyond operating systems Web development Miscellaneous Robotics There are also keynotes and devroom for a total of 488 sessions. Developers rooms that may particularly be of interest to readers of this blog are: Cross Desktop devroom – e.g. Wayland, gstreamer, razor-qt, Qt Project, Plasma Active, etc… Cross Distro devroom – e.g. Linux on Android, suse on ARM, ARMv8, systemd, etc… Embedded and mobile devroom – e.g. Baserock Embedded Linux, Guacamayo (Yocto), Nemo Mobile/ Mer project, arduino… All in all that’s a […]

January 20, 2013January 20, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

PicUntu – Rockchip RK3066 Linux Distribution for mini PCs (UG802, MK808, …)

Many people are using RK3066 mini PCs because they currently offer the best performance to cost ratio, but until now they were mainly limited to Android Jelly Bean, although there was some preliminary port of Ubuntu available for the devices. Now, this preliminary port has become a specific Linux distribution for Rockchip RK3066 PCs-on-a-stick called PicUntu, which is based on Ubuntu 12.10, and can optionally support Xfce or Gnome desktop environments. This distribution is known to work on UG802 and MK808, but should also work on some other RK3066 mini PCs such as iMito MX1. The latest version is Picuntu 0.9 RC 2.2, and features such as WiFi, Ethernet, HDMI audio, USB webcam are known to work, What you won’t get, however, is hardware video decoding and GPU support since Rockchip does not provide the relevant binary files for Linux, but this does not seem to stop the developers from […]

January 19, 2013May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 38 Comments

GPUs Comparison: ARM Mali vs Vivante GCxxx vs PowerVR SGX vs Nvidia Geforce ULP

I’m always very confused when it comes to comparing GPUs in different SoCs, and I could not really find comparisons on the web, so I’m going to give it a try even though, as you’re going to find out, it’s actually quite a challenge. There are mainly 4 companies that provide GPUs: ARM, Imagination Technologies, Vivante and Nvidia. [Update: Two comments mentioned Qualcomm Adreno and Broadcom VideoCore are missing from the list. Maybe I’ll do an update later]. Each company offers many different versions and flavors of their GPU as summarized below. ARM Imagination Technologies Vivante Nvidia Mali-400 Series: Mali-400 MP Mali-450 MP Mali-600 Series Mali-T604 Mali-T624 Mali-T628 Mali-T658 Mali-T678 PowerVR SGX Series 5: SGX520 SGX530 SGX531 SGX535 SGX540 SGX545 PowerVR SGX Series 5XT: SGX543MP1-16 SGX544MP1-16 SGX554MP1-16 PowerVR SGX Series 6: G6200 G6230 G6400 G6430 G6600 2D graphics: GC300 GC350 3D graphics: GC400 GC800 GC1000 GC2000 GC4000 ULP GeForce (Tegra […]

January 15, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Modular Graphics on Embedded ARM – ELCE 2012

Philipp Zabel, kernel developer at Pengutronix, discusses about graphics and video support for Linux on embedded SoCs at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012. Abstract: Porting Linux to new ARM based application processors has recently become easier than ever: the kernel gained many new frameworks like common-clock, oftree and pinmux. However, things get complicated when it comes to high end embedded graphics units.Those graphics systems tend to be composed of a multitude of on-SoC functional blocks that can operate on shared graphics buffers and video signals, as well as off-SoC encoder/converter chips that can be mixed and matched with any SoC.The old framebuffer is certainly not enough for today’s hardware any more, while modern frameworks like KMS and DRM have their own hassles on non-PC style graphics systems.The talk outlines issues we found while working on graphics and video support for the MX53 and MX6 CPUs and gives suggestions for possible […]

January 11, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Etnaviv Project Vivante GCxxx GPU Open Source Driver

You have most probably heard of Lima, an initiative to provide fully open source Mali-200 & Mali-400 drivers by reverse-engineering the closed source Mali GPU drivers. A separate effort, Etnaviv Project, has now started to offer open source drivers for Vivante GCxxx GPU used in SoC such as Marvell Armada 1500 (notably used in mainly Google TV platforms), Rockchip RK2918 (present in many older tablets), Freescale i.MX6 (used in newer tablets, low cost development boards, some SoMs and GK802/Hi802 mini PCs). The project is called Etnaviv. The introduction of Etnaviv Project reads as follows on the corresponding Github account: Project Etnaviv is an attempt to make an open source user-space driver for the Vivante GCxxx series of embedded GPUs. The current state of the project is experimental. It is currently only of use to developers interested in helping develop open source drivers for the hardware, reverse engineering, or in interfacing […]