More OpenGL binaries for the Mali support on Allwinner platforms with mainline Linux

Allwinner SoCBack in September, we announced the availability of Mali userspace blobs that provide OpenGL acceleration on Allwinner platforms using the mainline Linux kernel. Back then, only the r6p2 version of the Mali blobs were available, with only the x11 and fbdev backends, and only for ARM 32 bits. Following the announcement we made last September, we kept talking with Allwinner to release more binaries and increase the usefulness of them. Two major categories were missing in order to complete the previous batch of binaries Allwinner allowed us to distribute: Wayland and arm64 flavours.

After some discussions, Allwinner provided to us this week additional Mali blobs, covering Wayland support, ARM64, and also newer versions for some of them. Overall, we now provide:

  • r6p2 version, ARM 32 bits, X11
  • r6p2 version, ARM 32 bits, fbdev
  • r6p2 version, ARM 32 bits, Wayland (new)
  • r6p2 version, ARM 64 bits, X11 (new)
  • r6p2 version, ARM 64 bits, fbdev (new)
  • r6p2 version, ARM 64 bits, Wayland (new)
  • r8p1 version, ARM 32 bits, fbdev (new)
  • r8p1 version, ARM 64 bits, fbdev (new)

We pushed everything to our github repo, enjoy! See our previous blog post for instructions on how to use those blobs.

Those binary blobs are useful because they allow today to have a fully working OpenGL acceleration on Allwinner platforms: we recently ran a Qt5 application doing OpenGL rendering 24/7 on an Allwinner A33 platform for 1.5 month uninterrupted, as a stability test. Of course, long term, we are following the progress of the Lima project, which will provide a completely free and open-source solution to provide OpenGL acceleration on Allwinner platforms.

Author: Maxime Ripard

Maxime Ripard was an engineer at Bootlin between 2011 and 2019. More details...

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