Since the purchase of the BPI-W2, I have a dilemma with the problem of installing graphics drivers that cannot be introduced. Thus, 90% of the provided OS do not have HW acceleration. After one week of searching, I came to the conclusion that it is not possible to load drivers for BPI-W2
Does selling and providing BPI operating systems without GPU support?
Is it normal and legal at all? One OS where Mali 820 works is Android, the last OS that interests me. If I wanted to play with Android, I would have bought a TV box for a third of the price.
Thank you for any information on how to load the driver for the MALI 820 for the OS that SinoVoip provides, since outside the OS does not work on the ābackā offered OS.
(It, as I noticed, almost nothing works on BPI-W2).
There is no Official Graphic Drivers for Mali on any OS other than āAndroidā
There is an open source driver which some companies are working on called Lima(UtGard)/Panfrost(Midgard), which is a work of reverse engineering the Android drivers to Linux Kernel, but this is still a work in progress and will take a long time to become standard and stable.
Maybe you were not aware of this before purchasing the device. There is no SBC which have full stable GPU support on Linux. Except for RPI as they have developed the gpu drivers but it is for legacy kernel.
In the world of ARM SOC we need GPU driver and VPU driver as there is 2 different modules inside the CPU which controls the Graphical work with GPU and Video Processing with the help of VPU.
Now it depends on what is your purpose of using W2 with Linux OS?
Having received the board, Iāve tried the available image from the BPi downloads, namely:
2019-08-02-debian-10-buster-lite-preview-aarch64-bpi-w2-m4-sd-emmc.img
It provides an Armbian distro, which is good for me, except, that the kernel build is not a mainline, but a legacy one.
The only immediately visible problem, which has been discovered so far, is with the built-in video system. The video on console in a text mode is generated with significant delay and distortions as well as the terminal needs to be evoked with CTL+F1 or CTL+F2 to be available after the boot. I havenāt even dare setting up X-system.
Where could the RPI GPU driver for this legacy kernel be found and how could it be added ?
You can not.
There is no graphics driver for this very good card (only on paper) .
The only compatible system where you can use graphics acceleration is Android.
One of the reasons why he I put this card back, and i bought another device is just because the BPi-W2 canāt use graphics acceleration, just over the CPU. So it is not possible to view movies or use software that needs a graphic chip aceleration.
(Graphics acceleration is missing, the operating systems we tried, were unusable, only OS without GUI (terminal only))
PS:
Unfortunately, SinoVoip is not developing anything like this and it looks like it wonāt even be. Unfortunately. Some NAS (serious manufacturers) using RTD + T820 have developed this driver for Mali-T820.
Currently T-820 have good support in panfrost with latest mesa. But to make this work the video processor will need to have correct nodes in the device tree and this can only be done by a kernel developer who is supporting these devices.
Currently bpi only supports legacy kernels as mainlining is not a simple process and a very long and expensive process. Thatsy community developers work on such devices and try mainline it, also the chip manufacturer have a team to do this but that is only done as per their priority.
I am not very familiar with RTK devices and their mainlining effort, while with rockchip and allwinner they have a good record of mainlining their socs.
