Has enough support for the JH7110 and its GPU been upstreamed that I can use the latest kernel from Torvald’s github and have a chance the GPU will work?
I pointed my Debian sources to my closest mirror (no StarFive servers at all) and was able to upgrade just about everything to Trixie (Debian 13, currently testing) but get no GPU support (drm-print cannot find any devices). It looks like everything else is working - enough for my own non GPU code to run.
Debian doesn’t take the latest of everything - I found and dropped in Imagination’s rogue firmware for the GPU but that doesn’t appear to be enough (the file I grabbed is rogue_36.50.54.182_v1.fw from freedesktop.org, described in the commit as for the BXE-4-32).
The Trixie kernel is currently 6.12.12-1, looks like the latest on github is 6.14.
Thanks! It looks like the patch labelled “HDMI/DC8200” in the chart tracks the HDMI DRM driver (my knowledge is limited, but I assume this provides KMS support and the HDMI port can’t be enabled without it). There is no drivers/gpu/drm/verisilicon directory in my clone of Torvald’s linux repo; I’ll look in the starfive repos. I’m not sure if I can merge them, but maybe I can get KMS working by including that directory, even if Mesa uses the software llvmpipe renderer.
I think I’ll keep exploring building my own kernel and getting the right driver bits. I’m not on a deadline and it’s easier to do than I expected.
It’s a surprise to me that the display pipe IP would not be a part of the GPU IP - where I used to work, the display pipe had to read proprietary tiled memory formats that the pixel pipe and texture pipe used.
With Imagination’s tiled render, I guess tiling framebuffer memory isn’t so critical.
I think this patch is the latest version of the HDMI drm driver code. It’s been “archived” and the first comment I saw requests name standardization, but I can’t find any updates that make those changes.
This was back in November of last year, but maybe I didn’t find everything. Are there any more recent updates?
