Orange Pi Prime support

Quang-vip · February 20, 2021 at 1:16 AM

I've got an Orange Pi Prime for nearly a year and during that time I had many attempts to do graphics & video acceleration on Linux, but to no avail.
Specifically, with the official Armbian image for the Prime (it was Bionic that time), I tried to install the Mali blobs from mripard on github but things didn't go like I expected it to be....
Other than that, I also tried the official Android build for it, but you know, those Chinese builds are always unstable (buggy, sometimes some graphics artifacts,....)

So I'm wondering if we could bring support for the Pi Prime?

And since there is a build for the PC2, can we perhaps make some tweaks to make a build specifically for the Prime (basically the Prime is a PC2 but with built-in wireless capabilities)?

Or can I somehow compile it myself? Though it'd be great to benefit not only me but other fellow Pi Prime users.

Thanks for your attention!!

**jernej** · March 1, 2021 at 10:31 PM Official Post

Let me clarify few things:

1. GPU has nothing to do with video decoding - VPU does (completely separate thing with separate driver)

2. GPU on H5 is mali450 which was never supported in mripard's repo. There are no userspace binaries for it.

3. GPU on H5 is a bit special, even if you find mali450 blobs, it most probably won't work, only safe bet is mesa

4. Cedrus (VPU) driver exposes new interface which is not really supported anywhere except in gstreamer or patched ffmpeg, so basically no app will work out of the box.

5. Additional patches are needed for better video support, Cedrus driver is work in progress.

Yes, it's possible to add Prime support. Check scripts/uboot_helper for clues and wiki for build instructions. There is enough information to do it yourself. In the mean time, you can use PC2 images.