Collabora has just announced that the Panthor open-source GPU kernel driver for third-generation Arm Valhall GPUs (Arm Mali-G310, Mali-G510, Mali-G610, and Mali-G710) has now achieved OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance with the Arm Mali-G610 GPU found in the Rockchip RK3588 SoC. Just a few days ago, Linux 6.10 was released with “support for Mali CSF-based GPUs found on recent Arm SoCs from Rockchip or Mediatek”, as expected from the earlier article entitled “Panthor open-source driver for Arm Mali-G310, Mali-G510, Mali-G610, and Mali-G710 GPUs to be part of Linux 6.10” published last March. But this did not say anything about the level of support for the Valhall GPU since it’s common for new hardware to be added with minimal support, and OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance means it’s ready for business… Collabora’s announcement explains this was tested on a Radxa Rock 5B single board computer: The conformance tests ran on a Rock5b board […]
Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures
Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]
ODROID-H3/H4 x86 SBCs get M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x4 expansion cards with two or four M.2 sockets
ODROID-H3 and ODROID-H4 x86 single board computers have gotten two affordable M.2 expansion cards with the M.2 2×2 card adding two PCIe Gen 3 x2 slots and the M.2 4×1 adding four PCIe Gen 3 x1 slots (ODROID-H4 only) to the Intel SBCs. We’ve seen plenty of PCIe HAT+ boards for the Raspberry Pi 5 since the launch of the Arm SBC last year, but it’s limited by its PCIe Gen2/Gen3 x1 interfaces, and Hardkernel now provides two new M.2 cards leveraging the M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 socket of the ODROID-H3/H4 family allowing users to add up to four M.2 PCIe modules for storage, wired or wireless connectivity, and/or AI acceleration. M.2 2×2 card for ODROID-H3 and H4 series The M.2 2×2 card also named “M.2 – NVME” adds two M.2 Key-M PCIe sockets for 2280 size modules with each having a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface supporting up to 16GT/s. […]
High Torque Robotics Mini π is a bipedal robot powered by an Orange Pi 5 SBC
High Torque Robotics’ Mini π is a 54cm high bipedal robot that can walk and dance with two legs and leverages the Orange Pi 5 SBC’s features such as the 6 TOPS AI accelerator in the Rockchip RK3588S processor. The robot offers 12 degrees of freedom (DOF) and can run, jump, and even flip thanks to its twelve join motors that were developed by the company. The Mini π is designed for locomotion algorithm research and education and supports ZMP (zero moment point), MPC (Model Predictive Control), reinforcement learning locomotion control algorithms, and ROS SLAM navigation features. Mini π bipedal robot highlights: SBC – Orange Pi 5 RK3588S single board computer Controller – Custom-design “high-performance underlying controller” using 4x CAN FD communication DOF – 6 DoF per leg, or 12 in total Joint motors 8x HTDM-5047-36-NE with gear ratio: 36, 16Nm peak torque 4x HTDM-4438-32-NW with gear ratio: 32, […]
Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 WiFi 7 module for BPI-R4 SBC launched for $74
The Banana Pi BPI-R4 was introduced last year as a WiFi 7 router board with two 10GbE SFP cages and four GbE ports based on MediaTek Filogic 880 SoC. The only issue is that WiFi 7 is implemented through a dual mini PCIe module that was not available until now. The good news is that the tri-band Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 WiFi 7 module for the Banana Pi BPI-R4 board can now be purchased for $73.69 on Aliexpress. It is based on MediaTek MT7995AV WiFi 7 chipset, MT7976CN dual-band (2.4GHz and 5 GHz) chipset, and MT7977IAN 6GHz chipset. Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 specifications: MediaTek MT7995AV WiFi 7 – IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be compliant 32-bit RISC-V MCU for Wi-Fi protocols and Wi-Fi offload Embedded SRAM and ROM UART interface with hardware flow control MediaTek MT7976CN dual-band 2.4GHz 2×2 MIMO and 5GHz 3×3 MIMO MediaTek MT7977IAN 6GHz 3×3 MIMO Bandwidth 2.4 GHz – 20 and […]
Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro low-profile SBC features Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 AIoT SoC
Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro, also known as Armsom Sige5, is a low-profile single board computer (SBC) powered by the Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC for the AIoT market that offers a mid-range offering between Rockchip RK3588 and RK3399 SoCs. The board comes with 16GB LPDDR4X and 128GB eMMC flash by default, offers dual GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, an M.2 2280 PCIe socket for expansion, HDMI and MIPI DSI display interfaces, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header. Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores @ 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores @ 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0, and Vulkan 1.1 NPU – 6 TOPS (INT8) AI accelerator with support for INT4/INT8/INT16/BF16/TF32 mixed operations. VPU Video Decoder: […]
Allwinner T527 digital signage and Smart Display board offers HDMI, eDP, MIPI DSI, and LVDS display interfaces
MYiR Tech’s MYD-LT527-SX is a board designed for digital signage and Smart Display applications based on the MYC-LT527 Allwinner T527 system-on-module from the company and offering a range of display interfaces namely HDMI, eDP, MIPI DSI and dual-channel LVDS. The digital signage board builds upon MYiR Tech’s MYD-LT527 development board with a larger design featuring many of the same ports (dual GbE, USB 3.0, audio jack, HDMI output), and plenty of connectors for expansion including additional USB 2.0 interfaces, speaker and microphone, RS232, RS485, CAN Bus, and more. MYiR Tech’s MYD-LT527-SX specifications: SoM – MYC-LT527 system-on-module with SoC – Allwinner T527 CPU Octa-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor with four cores @ 1.80 GHz and four cores @ 1.42GHz E906 RISC-V core up to 200 MHz DSP – 600MHz HIFI4 Audio DSP GPU – Arm Mali-G57 MC1 GPU System Memory – 2GB LPDDR4 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash, 32Kbit EEPROM 381-pad LGA […]
NUMA emulation patch boosts Geekbench 6 benchmark results by up to 18% on Raspberry Pi 5
Igalia Engineer, Tvrtko Ursulin has recently submitted a patch to the Linux kernel adding a NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) emulation implementation for arm64 platforms that boosts the performance of 64-bit Arm targets by “splitting the physical RAM into chunks and utilizing an allocation policy to better utilize parallelism in physical memory chip organization”.
The NUMA emulation implementation was tested on a Raspberry Pi 5 SBC and the Geekbench 6 single-core score improved by 6%, while the multi-core score boosted by 18% after splitting into four emulated NUMA nodes. In other words, that’s like having a Broadcom BCM2712 CPU overclocked from 2.4 GHz up to 2.83 GHz.