i.MX6Q Android 8.0 UI Performance

[mosesyang]

Hi, I would like to know if there is any way we can improved the Android 8.0 graphic performance with i.MX6Q processor.

We recently ported Android 8.0 to our IMX6Q board with 2G RAM, and we noticed that the overall graphic performance is very slow. we can see obvious lagging from cursor movement. The lagging is more clear with LVDS output(1280x800). If we switch to HDMI 1280x720 output, the performance seems to be better, but it might be the monitor itself that helps the refresh rate. When we profile GPU performance as bar diagram on screen, LVDS and HDMI looks about the same.

We also tried playing with the cma and galcore.contiguousSize parameter in u-boot, but no help.

If you have any suggestion, please let me know. Anything appreciated!

[Tille]

How did this issue turn out? Is this still a problem with the 4.14.98 kernel? thinking about the latest Android 9 release for IMX6Q. I experienced a similar performance regression in Android 8 some time ago with 4.9.x kernel, but it worked fine in Nougat with 4.1.15 kernel.

Would be great if someone that has run the latest Android 9 release with IMX6Q hardware could speak about this.

[mosesyang]

One additional finding is that the issue seems to be specific to kernel 4.9.x.

Android 8.0 is using Kernel 4.9.17. I switch to Yocto with kernel 4.9.88 and I can see the same 2D performance issue.

If I rollback to Yocto with kernel 3.14.52 and 4.1.15, I don't see the performance issue.

I am guessing this might be a graphic driver issue.

Has anyone tried using kernel 4.1.15 for Android 8.0 or swap the vivante graphic driver?

Thanks.

[jamesbone]

Hello Moses,

This performance issue it is related to the framebuffer transition, which was deprecated in the kernel 4.9.x, to DRM-based display driver.

Have you tried it using the kernel 4.14.y?

[mosesyang]

Hi jamesbone,

I see the same performance issue with Yocto L4.14.78.

As you mentioned, if the framebuffer transition driver was deprecated in 4.9 kernel, then I thank any kernel after 4.9 will carry this problem.

Could you suggest what we can try next?

Android 8 is a hard requirement for our project. Does NXP has a working 4.1.15 kernel for the Android 8 build? or is there a way to swap older graphic driver to 4.9.17 kernel?

I tried swapping the /driver/mxc/gpu-viv/ folder with the one in 4.1.15 kernel, but encountered lots of compiling issue.

Thanks.

[diegoadrian]

Hello,

I do not think that there will be future support for the Linux kernel 4.1.15 on the Android 8 build. As far as I could find is that our Android version 7.1.1_1.0.0 uses the kernel 4.1.15.

Furthermore, I do think that is normal that you encountered a lot of compiling issues when you swapped the GPU folder. This could be due to the dependencies that the current Linux version has.

You could go with NXP professional service. They could help you porting the old graphics driver to our Android Oreo version. However, I cannot guarantee if this is possible or it will be the best solution for that. This is because the Android Oreo was specially made for the i.MX8 family is normal that the performance is not the best for our i.MX6 family. I apologize for the inconveniences this could give you.

Best Regards,

Diego.

[mosesyang]

Hi Jamesbone,

Thanks for your feedback.

I am compiling the newly released Yocto L4.14.78 and will report back soon.