Dear Thomas
Thanks for answer and help.
Yes, due to .date total removal in linux 6.14 (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/cb2e1c2136f71618142557ceca3a8802e87a44cd) the last DKMS sources are : https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-dkms/nba_last_src_20250212/src/
You can also find this sources in directory drivers/gpu/drm/ast_new of the tarball https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-kernel/linux-6.14.0.1-ast1.15.1-rc2_nba0_20250212.tar.gz
I'm surprised by the fact the in-kernel driver 0.1.0 is more advanced than Aspeed version 1.15.1 because on my system it has very poor rendering and is very slow, twinkle is high and had poor colors. The screen flickering is high and it's like if I was using a very old cathode ray tube monitor (In fact I'm using a SAMSUNG LCD monitor which is perfectly functionnal and which display a nice and eyes confortable picture when using ast 1.15.1 driver or the video output of the Nvidia GPU ).
My testing system is a test Xeon server with an AST2400 BMC with its AST VGA card as the main video output (to be able to have a screen on the BMC KVM) +a discrete NVIDIA GPU I'm using for GPGPU and 3D rendering with Nvidia prime render offload. What I constat with embed kernel driver 0.1.0 is that the Xeon processor is doing the video job for example when watching a video, and it's not the case with version 1.15.1 even when displaying on the AST VGA card a vulkan rotating cube (compute by nvidia GPU with nvidia prime but display by the AST VGA card of the AST2400). Note that with in-kernel version 0.1.0 it's nearly impossible to make round the vulkan cube at more than half a round by second where it's working (very) fine for a 32MB video memory card with version 1.15.1 as you can see in the video present in the online directory
I'm not developer or kernel developer so be sure that I wouldn't have done all this work if the in-kernel ast version 0.1.0 was usable out-of-the-box
Sure you can give me a patch I will test on this server (building mainline+ast_new yesterday tooks 19 minutes on this server)
PS: here is a 'git diff linux-6.14.0.1-ast-rc2/drivers/gpu/drm/ast linux-6.14.0.1-ast-rc2/drivers/gpu/drm/ast_new' https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-dump/ast-fullpatch.patch Diff is about 250+ kb so the 2 drivers seems to have nothing to do with each others...
Thanks again for help
Kind regards Nicolas
Le 2025-02-13 08:57, Thomas Zimmermann a écrit :
Hi NicolasAm 12.02.25 um 19:58 schrieb Nicolas Baranger:
Dear maintener
That's mostly me and Jocelyn.
I did include ast-drm driver version 1.15.1 (in replacement of version 0.1.0) on the new mainline kernel too (6.14.0-rc2) and I issue a new dkms patch
Last DKMS patch had been sucessfully tested on mainline. And last ast.ko version 1.15.1 included in linux tree had also been sucessfully tested
Online directory is updated with : - new DKMS patch - new DKMS srouces - new DKMS debian package - new tarball of mainline included ast_new ported in kernel tree - new kernel debian package (mainline with ast_new)
NB: online directory is here: https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/
Please let me know what I should do to see this change in linux-next
I'm having a little trouble with figuring out which of the many driver sources is the relevant one. Am I correct to assume it's the one at https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-dkms/nba_last_src_20250212/src/About that driver: Although the official driver reports an ancient version number, it is an up-to-date driver. It is actually more up-to-date than Aspeed's package. Both drivers share source code and a few years ago there was an effort to bring the kernel's driver up to the same feature set. Since then, the kernel's driver has been updated, reworked and improved. About the performance: From what I can tell, the only significant difference in these drivers is memory management. Your ast_new driver uses an older algorithm that we replaced quite a few releases ago. The old version was unreliable on systems with little video memory, so we had to replace it. I don't know why the new code should be slower though. If I give you a patch against a recent Linux kernel, are you capable of building the patched kernel and testing that change on your system? Best regardsThomas
Thanks for help
Kind regards Nicolas Baranger
Le 2025-02-11 19:15, Nicolas Baranger a écrit :
Dear maintener
For my own usage, I did make work the ASPEED ast-drm 1.15.1 video driver on mainline kernel (6.13.0 + 6.13.1).
ASPEED video driver is availiable here: https://www.aspeedtech.com/file/support/Linux_DRM_1.15.1_4.tar.gz
But it only work for LTS kernel So I modify the DKMS package and I build a new Debian DKMS package with the adapted source. My patch can be find here : https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-dkms/astdiff.patch See the README: https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-dkms/README
Using this new 'ast 1.15.1' driver, performance are amazing compared to the 'ast' driver include in kernel tree, specially when using a discrete GPU and offloading VULKAN / 3D on it but using AST VGA card as the main video card and as the main and only video output (the discrete GPU is used only for offloading 3D or for cuda/opencl)
So to make things easier, I include the new 'ast 1.15.1' driver in kernel tree as AST_NEW : linux-6.13.1-ast/drivers/gpu/drm/ast_new' It's working fine as you can see on this video : https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/vulcan_nvidia_prime_render_offload_on_ast_vga_card.webm I upload all the work I've done here : https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/
See the global README : https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/README
and the README in nba-kernel sub-directory : https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/nba-kernel/README
I'm not a developer so please let me know if I made the things the right way and if this new 'ast 1.15.1' driver can be ported to linux-next or linux-? ? If you need more explanations, do not hesitate to contact me, I would be happy to help
Kind regards Nicolas Baranger
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