Which distro has the best VF2 GPU support?

I got my VF2 last week and I’ve tried a handful of distros so far. I have got Xorg working at 1080p under the Starfive Debian(69) image but 4K output doesn’t work at all and nor does Vulkan/OGLES. I tried the newer SF Debian images and 4K kinda worked but the colours were wrong so it was really unusable.

Are there any VF2 distros that offer working 4K output under Wayland/xorg, working Vulkan/OGLES and have packaged ffmpeg with VDEC support for hardware accelerated h264/HEVC 4K video playback? If not, which distro is currently the closest or is the easiest to get all of this configured?

Has anyone got VDEC working with ffmpeg? Does VDEC ffmpeg work with the open source GPU driver? How about mpv support for VDEC? mpv is my video player of choice but they only mention ffmpeg on the wave511 page:

@danboid There is a script in /opt to fix the colours.
Here is a post to install gl4es (and box64). It might help with better OpenGL support.

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I suspect that it will be the very next official “Debian” image from StarFive which at a very big guess will be available sometime between now and possibly three weeks depending on how many bug fixes and improvements are added (longer = more, faster = less).

ref: VisionFive 2 Debian Wiki - 202303 Release | RVspace

What’s Next - WIP

  • Debian-Installer support - Could support both SD + eMMC boot in single image.
  • NVMe PCIe enablement and test
  • Improved X Desktop user experience
  • Vulkan support
  • Firefox hardware acceleration
  • 1080p60 video playback
  • Upgrade tool for between releases
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I’d not noticed that script until you mentioned it. That has fixed the colours for my 1080p display but the colour problem persists on my 4K display even after running that script and rebooting under starfive-jh7110-VF2-SD-wayland.img.

EDIT

Actually it does work for 4K too. It seems you need to run the script and reboot at least once for each different resolution you need to run Wayland at.

GNOME / Wayland works OK at 4K under starfive-jh7110-VF2-SD-wayland.img after running the script under /opt (and rebooting) but if I run apt upgrade and update to the latest mesa the cursor becomes super jerky and it frequently stops moving entirely for several seconds at a time.

Worse yet, unplugging then re-attaching the HDMI cable causes the VF2 to reset!

That is the one thing you should not do with the current official “Debian” image from StarFive. It will do the total opposite of what you would expect because if you upgrade any prepatched package to do with the GPU or kernel you will be removing functionality because the later version number does not have any VisionFive2 board specific patches (yet). Everything will probably work as you would expect by the time that linux kernel 6.5 or 6.6 is a mainline kernel.

The current Engineering image files from StarFive are to bring the board up to a good enough working state for software developers to be able to do their magic, it is not an official Debian image, in fact there are currently no official Debian images that support the RISC-V architecture.

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