[Pkg-Mali-devel] Debian mali pckaging status

[Wookey]

OK. Welcome to the (currently quite exclusive) list :-)

Let's start with the current status and what needs doing next.

We have 
 * a midgard dkms kernel package (r16-midgard): mali-midgard
 * a midgard binary package (r16-midgard): mali-midgard-driver
Both in debian
 * a bifrost binary package (r9-bifrost): mali-bifrost-driver
 (only in git): 

 * utgard is not really catered for, but there is nothing stopping us
   packing up the mali 400 (From freeelectons/allwinner) and 450 (from
   arm) driver, and making a suitbaly vintage mali-utgard kernel driver 
   (but probably with a load of patches to make it build on current kernels)
   In fact I have a mali-utgard-driver package (for 450 only) I made ages ago.
   I should check that in so we can make it match the others.

Wiki pages:
https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics
https://wiki.debian.org/MaliMidgard

Looks like r16-midgard is the same release as r4-bifrost.

The r16-midgard dkms package now builds on armhf (firefly) and arm64
(hilkey960), but does not build for me on arm64 (softiron) due to a
mysterious tool exec-format error. I'll mail about that separately.

Sumit reports that the r9-bifrost userspace driver does not run on the
r16-midgard/r4-bifrost kernel driver: it needs a newer one. That makes sense.

Because the midagard and bifrost kernel drivers are the same, and the
release team tell me they expect that to remain true, it would make
sense to use this for both midagard and bifrost. However, we can only
do that by moving all the packages forward to much newer versions, and
if we do that we lose X support. And all our actual/likely users use X
so that's a massive pain.

Thus I propose that we upload a separate mali-bifrost (dkms) package
(which conflicts with the midgard one) with a current version of the
kernel driver. That should work with the mali-bifrost-driver userspace

This way we can support current X midgard users for a while (next
debian stable release?) but also support newer userspace drivers.

I guess if we are doing this the package-names are actually rather
unhelpful, and the new one should be called something to indicate that
it is newer, rather than specifically for bifrost. mali-current?

This is all quite crap, but I don't have any better ideas for having
something vaguely useful in the distro.

What do you think? Is this a sensible plan? Any better ideas?

Sumit - can you update us on the current state of upstream DTB info for hikey960.
anyone: can we get some other DTB info upstreamed (juno? anything else useful)

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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