Now that is good news. I'll be trying that out. Wonder if it's armhf or armel, and what have they done for hardware acceleration I wonder?
This is incredible news deserving of sticky and it's own sub-forum. I can confirm it's working and is armhf (per this test) It also comes out of the box ready to support fuse, new kernels, etc etc which we couldn't get from the old Linaro install. :mrgreen:
Yep, armhf but alas it doesn't seem to have graphical hardware acceleration (blame Vivante of course). The link bugmenot posted is it armhf or armel? is one of the best explanations of what exactly is the difference I've yet seen. Wish I'd have seen that months ago when I wanted to know the difference.
now, does any of the distros available offers graphical hardware acceleration? i dont think i would use it but would be nice to push its capabilities if used as a media device. why is vivante the culprit?
In reverse order... Vivante designed the graphics accelerators (they are Fabless, like ARM so they just do the designs). On the Quad that is GC2000/GC355/GC320, on the Dual it's GC880/GC320. Think of the OS Linux as consisting of two sides of a fence. Kernel Space & User Space (you can wiki/google those terms). The graphics drivers occupy both sides (obviously, if you stop to think it through and what is involved). Vivante have released source code for the Kernel Space half, but not User Space. They have only released Binaries for User Space. This means you are stuck with what they give you. Their latest Binaries are for the 3.0.35 Kernel, for armel only (that the soft floating point version IE floating point done in software, as old ARM architectures don't have any hardware to do those functions). This is why we can't get hardware acceleration working on armhf (hardware floating point on the VPU). However there is hope, there do seem to be Alpha quality armhf binaries available in the last few weeks. Yes, hardware acceleration is working on armel. An example if Debian Wheezy (armel) with LXDE
I can confirm that the image udoo_dual_ubuntu_1.3.zip for Udoo dual on the downloads page has hardware acceleration (both hardware accelerated OpenGLES 2.0 and hardware accelerated h264 video decoding). After changing links to the -fb.so's in /usr/lib my app plays a 1280x720 h264 video in a 1280x720 scene rendered at 60 fps. When I try to run the application with the x11 libs, it crashes in eglSwapBuffers. Vivante is called the culprit because libraries like libGAL.so, libEGL.so and libVIVANTE.so are only available in binary form. It is up to Vivante/Freescale to provide libraries compatible with the drivers and with the right abi (armel or armhf). As far as I know, no armhf libraries are available for the latest galcore driver.
So what is Vivante doing in all these devices? what are the other Arm GPU's out there?? Thanks for the feedback. Getting to know all these ARM devices which I have so much hope on.
