This will likely at some point be helpful for us.
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Without living this every day, it’s a bit hard to figure out what’s released, where, and when it will land. What I can dig up is that the JH7110 on the VF2 sports a IMG BXE-4-32 MC1 GPU (@ 400 MHz, 600 MHz peak), but following the links at Open Source GPU Driver - Imagination Developer I wasn’t able to see the relevant bits.
If someone has a better understanding, then please share.
ADD: It supposedly became available in the “DDK Rel.23.1” which I haven’t been able to locate either.
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There was some discussion in here:
My understanding is that they do not support the one used in JH7110 (BXE-4-32), but they support BXS-4-64 which is very close specs-wise, and likely a variant of the same architecture.
I am hopeful the GPU we have will get support at some point, but I do not know enough about ImaTech’s GPU technology to be certain.
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Thanks. I found this overview of the “B” famility, including BXE (VF2), BXM (Lichee Pi 4A), and BXS (this announcement) which might be of interest here: Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
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Is this it ?
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/staging/23.1/src/gallium/drivers/zink
Or possibly this ?
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/23.1/src/gallium/drivers/zink
I do not know anything, I’m only guessing.
Or possibly: mesa-23.1.3 from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tags. Which I would guess is the equivalent of running:
git clone -depth 1 --branch mesa-23.1.3 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa.git
But with a much much faster download speed.
Because I just noticed that the size of mesa/mesa it uses 9.3 TB of Storage
I don’t think that can be right:
$ du -hs /tmp/mesa
526M /tmp/mesa
and that’s not a shallow copy.
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Maybe that is just the main branch and tags, but not all the remote branches.
git branch -r
I have all the branches:
$ git branch -r
origin/10.0
...
origin/staging/23.1
$ git branch -r | wc -l
64
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I wonder where that 9.3TB comes from (see image in my post four back, maybe they have allocated 9.3TB for future storage use), it looks odd.
I don’t want to sound negative, but reading the announcement on the Imagination website, I don’t expect anything for us.
“they present a competitive offering to the data centre and desktop (DCD) market”
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I just observe the facts, not the announcement. The facts are that they are contributing this to the open source Zink. It’s up to the likes of StarFive and Alibaba to ensure that this isn’t limited to BXS but will cover BXE and BXM as well. Given how close these products are it really shouldn’t be more than a question of priorities.
It isn’t just up to the likes of StarFive and AliBaba to try to port this to the BXE and BXM series. Imagination Technologies could have paid more to Collabora to implement support for BXE and BXM in Mesa/Vulkan/Zink.
I have asked several times on Twitter, but so far Imagination Technologies dodged the question on open source support for the BXE series and they only invited people to ask support in their forum.
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When Imagination use the moniker DDK it is their proprietary driver.
To have talk a bit with the open source people, the GPU on the VF2 is on their watchlist for support in later version of the open source driver. They have to focus on a limited amount of GPU for now because they want that to be released ASAP, and once it is done, supporting other GPU of the same architecture should not be too hard for them to add.
Will still need testing and such, but they are working on it basically.
Also as far as I can see, Collabora was only used as consultancy, the driver is 100% done in house. (at least that what they say in the email they sent to both mesa and the linux kernel)
And from the commit data, the open source team seems small. there are not that many committers on both Mesa and the kernel sources changes.
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