[Arm-netbook] Flashing the NAND

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2013 15:14:19 +0100
Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday 11 December 2013, you wrote:
> > There is one more thing that may be relevant for you. The old r3p0
> > version of the mali blob can't fully utilize both pixel processors
> > of the Mali400 MP2. So the performance is not optimal on Allwinner A20.
> > It is possible to upgrade to a newer version r3p2-01rel2 of the blob to
> > get better performance, but I was not very sure about it without a good
> > justification (like somebody having a real use for OpenGL ES and
> > able/willing to report bugs):
> >     http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.netbook.arm.sunxi/4676
> > Also blobs are a temporary placeholder solution until we get free
> > open source drivers. Investing extra efforts into getting blobs
> > running may be counter productive at this moment.
> 
> I tried to use it once,
> but i got an unresolved symbol.
> I think is the one you mentioned there: 
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/linux-sunxi/zx4gwC1QyMc/h_mFGeL6nzMJ
> 
> is that preload hack still necessary?

Yes, the _mali_clz_lut problem still needs to be workarounded.
The r3p2-01rel2 mali blobs did not get any better since that time.

The r3p0 is a monolithic blob, so it can be packaged quite easily
for any distro (I had some ebuilds for gentoo) without even having
the blob itself included in the package. It's just a matter of
installing a set of symlinks and then asking the user to drop the
blob into some predefined location to finalize the installation.
The responsibility of obtaining a legal copy of the blob is the
user's problem.

With r3p2-01rel2 we now have to deal with a set of blobs (EGL,
GLESv1, GLESv2) and additionally apply a preload hack to get it
working. Hence the logistics becomes more difficult.

Other than that, the r3p2-01rel2 mali blobs status is that I can
use them on my own Cubieboard2 successfully. And they definitely
provide better performance than r3p0. But I'm just not ready to
support this configuration for the end users at the moment.

If you want more detailed instructions about installing and using
mali r3p2-01rel2 drivers, I can provide such instructions. But I don't
think that this mailing list is the right place. And especially not
this discussion thread with the "Flashing the NAND" subject :-)

-- 
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka