topic Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv in i.MX Processors

i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

Maddis — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:01:54 GMT

We have i.MX53 based custom HW and so far we have been using 2.6 - series kernel since that was the last officially supported one.

I noticed that that Yocto 2.2 have support for i.MX53 and kernel 4.9 has the Etnaviv opensource graphics driver too.

So, I compiled our image for imx53qsb, that has 1024x768 lvds - display because it was the quickest way to get image up and running. I got system up and running and graphics are working. Only thing is that Wayland/Weston is sloooow. I don't think there is any acceleration going on. If I even try to move mouse the weston cpu-usage goes to 60-95% and cursor barely moves.

The HW is capable to handle the display because we have similar size(in resolution) display in our product and it works way faster with older kernel/drivers.

Have anyone have better luck with i.MX53 and Etnaviv?

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

gusarambula — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 20:19:57 GMT

Hello Mc Maddie,

I’m afraid that there is no support for hardware acceleration outside the official BSP, and as you mentioned the last official BSP was for kernel 2.6. The i.MX53 GPU is intellectual property of a third party (not Freescale/NXP) and thus there is no support outside the official BSPs.

My recommendation would be keeping on using the supported kernel version (even though is an old one), if hardware acceleration is important for your project.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cphealy1 — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 22:41:34 GMT

There is active work in the opensource community to support the GPU in the i.MX53. The GPU IP in the i.MX53 ended up being what is now known as the Adreno series in the Qualcomm Snapdragon line of SoCs. The GPU IP core in the i.MX53 is the Adreno 205 and support is being worked on with Freedreno.

If you are patient, there will soon be support for the GPU using the latest kernel. (Support for pretty much everything else including the display controller, crypto, and HW video accelerator is already in place in the mainline kernel.)

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

alexberenshtein — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 11:19:16 GMT

Hi, Mr. Chris Healy.

I see 3 problems :

- no support GPU in kernel ( ver 4.XXXX) ;

- no support GPU in X-server ( last version );

- no support GPU in z160 library ( last version ) ;

Tel me please , when it is possible to complete work .

This is Official release ?

Best regards.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cphealy1 — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 18:20:53 GMT

Hi Alex,

You are correct that none of these three things exist in a complete form yet in any official release.

Userspace support for the 3D GPU (AMD Z430 or Adreno A205) in the i.MX51 and i.MX53 is being developed in Mesa which will expose OpenGL ES 2.0 support. Once this support lands in upstream Mesa, it should be possible to run Qt applications (for example) using the eglfs backend thus leveraging the 3D GPU.

Kernel support for the 3D GPU is pretty stagnant at the moment. That said, it is possible to use the KGSL driver with minor modifications on top of the mainline kernel to support the 3D GPU.

For the AMD Z160, there is already userspace code for using it, but I know very little about it. You can find it here: xorg/driver/xf86-video-freedreno - X.Org driver for Adreno mobile GPUs As you'll see, there is support for both the Z160 and Z180 in this codebase.

I'm working with some folks to get sufficient support added for the use cases I have which involve running Qt applications that leverage the 3D GPU.

Are there particular use cases you are looking to solve?

Regards,

Chris

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

alexberenshtein — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 06:31:02 GMT

Hi, Mr. Chris Healy.

Thank for cooperation.

Yes , I have few cases.

I build system with:

1. i.MX53;

2. Yocto - 2.4 ;

3. Kernel Ver. 4.xxx;

4. Qt Ver. 5.9.xx;

My system is works. But i have problem with GPU module.

Graphics , with Qt application , run very slow.

I wait , official release , from "NXP" with GPU support , or correct patches for my system .

Maybe you know, when will the official release , with GPU support ?

Best regards.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

kman_devnull — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 20:20:51 GMT

Hi Mc Maddie,

I noticed you say:

>> I noticed that that Yocto 2.2 have support for i.MX53 ...

I am a newbie, I am trying to build yocto+iMX53+lvds+qt5+qtwebkit, but when I downloaded yocto2.2 from here I don't see any support/recipes for iMX53 in yocto 2.2 - did I misunderstand what you said?

Please if you could share how to build,

* yocto for iMX53

* with lvds,qt5 support (& if you know qtwebkit as well please)

Many thanks.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cphealy1 — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 05:42:41 GMT

Hi Alex,

i.MX51 and i.MX53 GPU support is landing in the upcoming 4.21 kernel. The support that's landing in the 4.21 kernel has been successfully tested with Weston 5.0 and Qt 5.11.2. The necessary userspace bits are still in work and should land in the next month or so with Mesa 19.0. Based on comparison testing, performance in many use cases exceeds that of the original GPU driver.

With this GPU support, there is now full multimedia and graphics support in the mainline kernel for the i.MX51 and i.MX53.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

Maddis — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 06:30:29 GMT

I was referring to meta-freescale - layer (meta-freescale - Layer containing NXP hardware support metadata ). But it has the same issue as before that kernel for i.MX53 is really old. Based on Chris's msg support for newer kernel should be 'coming soon'.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

Maddis — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 06:35:17 GMT

It this with open source driver or closed sourced binary driver like it currently is?

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cphealy1 — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 21:37:38 GMT

Hi Mc Maddie,

I am referring to a fully open source driver for the GPU. Full support has arrived and is upstream for the i.MX51 and i.MX53 now. You will need the 5.0 kernel and Mesa 19.0. With these, you will have full graphics and video support working with no NXP source or binary packages needed. (The only exception is the need for the two GPU firmware blobs but they can be cherry picked out of the NXP BSPs.)

I'm using an i.MX51 with a 1280x768 display and under the right circumstances can achieve 60fps with our Qt GUI.

Regards,

Chris

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

Maddis — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 09:10:20 GMT

Hi,

That sounds good!

Are there any documentation how to take the graphics driver in use with i.MX53? Especially about the firmware blobs.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

tarakpatel — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 15:06:29 GMT

Hi Chris,

Can you let us know how to get those firmware blob and which are they? As we also have custom imx53 board and we are running FreeScale/NXP Official BSP and would like to move from their to the latest kernel. We also require QT Support. As we have learnt from you that mainline kernel now officially support Full Multimedia Capabilities we would like to try and test it on our imx53 based board.

Thanks for your time and help,

Tarak Patel

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

Maddis — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 07:23:48 GMT

Hi,

I've been now spent few days this weeks compiling Linux 5.0 and mesa 19.x to imx53-qsb - development board and got it compiled and something displaying on screen as well.

The problem is will with the freedreno - driver (I assume that's the opensource driver for the graphics for imx53). I'm not entirely sure if I got it enabled in Linux, I think it's enabled via the MSM - config option. And added freedreno also to mesa. Yet everything I try to start weston it complains about missing imx-drm - driver.

Does the freedreno need some device tree changes? And it seems that configuration help would be appreciated as well with those firmware blob handling.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cphealy1 — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:57:24 GMT

With the 5.0 kernel, the necessary devicetree patches are in place for the i.MX53 to support the "imageon/adreno" GPU. The relevant kernel patch that added the necessary devicetree change is here:

kernel/git/stable/linux.git - Linux kernel stable tree

Before getting into running with Wayland/Weston, I would suggest the following steps:

1) Make sure the driver for the GPU in the kernel is loading correctly. (You should see some lines with the text msm and a200 in them that are successful.)

2) In userspace, try something simple like "kmscube" before moving to running Wayland/Weston. If "kmscube" does not work, nothing more complex will work.

3) If "kmscube" does not work, please share the verbose log output from it as well as the output from "modetest -c".

Independent of the above, can you share your target use case for the graphical stack? What do you plan on running on top of Weston? What screen resolution and bit depth display are you working with?

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

Maddis — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 03:57:38 GMT

Thanks, I'll get back to you if/when I run into problem or get it running.

Atm. I'm using imx53-qsb development board that has 1024x768 resolution screen @ 18-bit(I think) colors connected. If I don't remember too wrong that is the display it came with (It's been years since we got it).

The plan is, once I get this working hopefully, to update the software of our imx53 based devices so that it's no longer that Linux 2.6 based system and run all kinds of apps on top of the Weston.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cxbere — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 14:16:23 GMT

Hi Chris,

We have same problem (Our custom board has 2.6.35 kernel and we want to upgrade it to newer kernel version...) It was very good to hear Linux 5.0 and QT support. Are there any guide or documentation about take the graphics driver or yocto project which include Linux 5.0 and other things.

Best Regards,

Ercüment TÜRK

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

cphealy1 — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:51:17 GMT

Support for the i.MX53 with the mainline kernel has been good for several releases now. If one were to use the 5.4 kernel with Mesa 19.3, they would have full OpenGL ES 2.0 HW acceleration using Freedreno in Mesa. Additionally, HW video decode works correctly with recent kernel, Mesa, and Gstreamer.

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

burakaydin — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 14:29:49 GMT

Hi Chris,

How can we try i.MX53 with the configuration you have indicated? (5.4 kernel, mesa 19.3, opengl es 2.0 hw acceleration)? Is there a BSP support repo url for yocto? Or should we manually compile kernel and required libraries you mentioned?

Kind Regards,

Burak

Re: i.MX53, Linux 4.9 and Etnaviv

alexberenshtein — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 13:52:19 GMT

Hi Chris.

I try build system i.MX53 ( qsb-board) with GPU.

I build BSP with Yocto - Rocko , Sumo , Thud , Warrior , Zeus.

I see GPU does not work.

After that I build kernel 5.4 with Yocto - Rocko , Sumo , Thud , Warrior , Zeus.

GPU does not work.

In addition, I see , we have problem with X11.

I see xorg.conf file ,

Section "Device"
Identifier "i.MX Accelerated Framebuffer Device"
Driver "imx"
Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
# This option only recognized when "mxc_epdc_fb" frame buffer driver in
# use. Values are "RGB565" (default, 16-bit RGB), "Y8" (8-bit gray),
# and "Y8INV" (8-bit gray inverted).
Option "FormatEPDC" "Y8INV"
EndSection

, we have problem.

If we change : Driver "imx" to Driver "fbdev" , Xort is working.

Section "Device"
Identifier "i.MX Accelerated Framebuffer Device"
Driver "fbdev"
Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
# This option only recognized when "mxc_epdc_fb" frame buffer driver in
# use. Values are "RGB565" (default, 16-bit RGB), "Y8" (8-bit gray),
# and "Y8INV" (8-bit gray inverted).
Option "FormatEPDC" "Y8INV"
EndSection

I think no work GPU accelerator.

Maybe someone launched the GPU on i.MX53.

Best regards.