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Back then I was interested in the $90 Pinebook and finally opted against it, mainly because the driver support seemed problematic. The new Pinebook Pro accordin

by onli 8y ago

Back then I was interested in the $90 Pinebook and finally opted against it, mainly because the driver support seemed problematic. The new Pinebook Pro according to the article will have a RK3399: Arm Cortex-A72 + quad-core Cortex-A53 + Mali T860 MP4 GPU. Can someone here judge based on the specs how driver support of that laptop will be like? Does the Mali gpu have a proper free (kernel-included?) linux driver? I did not find the answers to that.

StreamBright 8y ago
https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics RM produce designs for a GPU called 'Mali'. This is incorporated in many SoCs and thus devices. It is used in a number of devices that can run Debian. There are three major revisions of Mali GPUs: Utgard, Midgard, and Bifrost. See wikipedia page for reference. Partial free drivers were developed for Utgard but were abandoned (lima). Work on Utgard has continued by a new set of developers (lima). Free drivers for Midgard and Bifrost are under active development but are not yet ready for Debian users (panfrost). Proprietary drivers are also available from the vendor for each Mali version. Since 2016, the binary drivers put out by ARM have been redistributable and thus can be packaged for non-free. GPLed kernel shim drivers are also released by ARM, which is eligible for Debian contrib. As of March 2017, these have been packaged in Debian for Midgard devices; see MaliMidgard. Upstream proprietary drivers are available from The ARM developer site
- onli 8y ago
  Thanks. But that's bad: > ARM dropped support for X in their releases after r16 (Jan 2017). This is a massive pain as that's what we all still use. Only wayland, fbdev and android are supported after that. If that's not misleading and there would be no proper X support the laptop is a no-starter for me. On the other hand, panfrost is in mesa now and https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Performance-Fast https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost... sounds promising. Maybe that free driver will be ready till then.
ah- 8y ago
I have a RockPro64, which is basically that as a SBC. Runs well with just mainline Linux, apart from the GPU. There are blobs, but I didn't manage to get them to work with recent Xorg or Wayland. But there's hope in the form of Panfrost, which seems to be coming along nicely: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Performance-Fast https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost...
- jandrese 8y ago
  My experience with Pine64 is that if it didn't work out of the box you're not going to get a fix later. And that definitely includes the video drivers. It's kind of a shame because the chipset has good specs on paper, but the driver situation is a total shitshow. I don't even think I ever even got the GPIO pins to work.
joshvm 8y ago
The RK3399 has improved mainline support in 4.21/5, I think (which is just out now, thankfully!). Right now it'll work, but some boards (like the Rock960) are still a bit sketchy and things are missing. The user leds aren't in the device tree on the Rock960 for example. Otherwise you're at the whim of maintainers, eg if you want docker you need a kernel with aufs/overlay support and this is often not the case. Speed wise though, it's plenty fast.
- onli 8y ago
  Thanks, Mainline support is great. And like mentioned above, that there is mesa/panfrost for the gpu could very well mean that this time the driver situation will actually be quite good when the laptop comes out. I'm looking forward to see how it works out.
  - joshvm 8y ago
    You can see the current status here: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix May be a little out of date though.

by onli 8y ago

StreamBright 8y ago

https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics RM produce designs for a GPU called 'Mali'. This is incorporated in many SoCs and thus devices. It is used in a number of devices that can run Debian. There are three major revisions of Mali GPUs: Utgard, Midgard, and Bifrost. See wikipedia page for reference. Partial free drivers were developed for Utgard but were abandoned (lima). Work on Utgard has continued by a new set of developers (lima). Free drivers for Midgard and Bifrost are under active development but are not yet ready for Debian users (panfrost). Proprietary drivers are also available from the vendor for each Mali version. Since 2016, the binary drivers put out by ARM have been redistributable and thus can be packaged for non-free. GPLed kernel shim drivers are also released by ARM, which is eligible for Debian contrib. As of March 2017, these have been packaged in Debian for Midgard devices; see MaliMidgard. Upstream proprietary drivers are available from The ARM developer site

onli 8y ago
Thanks. But that's bad: > ARM dropped support for X in their releases after r16 (Jan 2017). This is a massive pain as that's what we all still use. Only wayland, fbdev and android are supported after that. If that's not misleading and there would be no proper X support the laptop is a no-starter for me. On the other hand, panfrost is in mesa now and https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Performance-Fast https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost... sounds promising. Maybe that free driver will be ready till then.

ah- 8y ago

I have a RockPro64, which is basically that as a SBC. Runs well with just mainline Linux, apart from the GPU. There are blobs, but I didn't manage to get them to work with recent Xorg or Wayland. But there's hope in the form of Panfrost, which seems to be coming along nicely: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Performance-Fast https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost...

jandrese 8y ago
My experience with Pine64 is that if it didn't work out of the box you're not going to get a fix later. And that definitely includes the video drivers. It's kind of a shame because the chipset has good specs on paper, but the driver situation is a total shitshow. I don't even think I ever even got the GPIO pins to work.

joshvm 8y ago

The RK3399 has improved mainline support in 4.21/5, I think (which is just out now, thankfully!). Right now it'll work, but some boards (like the Rock960) are still a bit sketchy and things are missing. The user leds aren't in the device tree on the Rock960 for example. Otherwise you're at the whim of maintainers, eg if you want docker you need a kernel with aufs/overlay support and this is often not the case. Speed wise though, it's plenty fast.

onli 8y ago
Thanks, Mainline support is great. And like mentioned above, that there is mesa/panfrost for the gpu could very well mean that this time the driver situation will actually be quite good when the laptop comes out. I'm looking forward to see how it works out.
- joshvm 8y ago
  You can see the current status here: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix May be a little out of date though.