Hi Thomas
We're not going to merge a second driver for hardware we already
support. The upstream kernel's driver is the one we should improve. I'm
glad for the bug report and information you already provided. If you
want to help with further testing and, you're welcome to do so.
Sure I understand !
No problems to continue testing or whatever could help
Thanks again
Kind regards
Nicolas Baranger
Le 2025-02-14 13:46, Thomas Zimmermann a écrit :
Hi
Am 14.02.25 um 13:09 schrieb Nicolas Baranger:
Dear Jocelyn
Thanks for answer and help
Ok, I will try linux 6.1 (could you confirm that every commit in 6.1
before 965361 should be relevant ?)
If I need to have "~correct or better to say 'acceptable' year 2025
performances~" on AST2400 VGA card it's because at the hardware level
if I select the NVIDIA discrete GPU as the main server video output, I
lost all the server management benefits and capabilities of the
AST2400 BMC (except PSU management) as I get a black screen... And
it's dangerous as keyboard and mouse keep working on the black screen
and so, can launch destructive actions without knowing it !
Also I'm still surprise by Thomas answer as the aspeed drm drivers
1.15.1 is dated of December 2024...
Well, I cannot find a difference except for the old memory management.
Aspeed has meanwhile also contributed patches to the upstream kernel.
They might cover some of the differences. I also noticed that the
Aspeed driver for v6.6 seems to use the newer memory management.
And Jammy Huang from AspeedTech teold me to contact here to upstream
the ast_new adaptation I've made after he knows that I did version
1.15.1 work on mainline (Aspeed only support LTS kernel and their dkms
package were not usable out-of-the-box on mainline)
I may surely be wrong and some explanations could help me to
understand which is the actual situation of ast driver in kernel tree.
We're not going to merge a second driver for hardware we already
support. The upstream kernel's driver is the one we should improve. I'm
glad for the bug report and information you already provided. If you
want to help with further testing and, you're welcome to do so.
Best regards
Thomas
I would let you know the results in 6.1
Again thanks a lot for help !
Kind regards,
Nicolas Baranger
-------- Message d'origine --------
De : Jocelyn Falempe <jfalempe@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date : 14/02/2025 10:11 (GMT+01:00)
À : Nicolas Baranger <nicolas.baranger@xxxxxx>, Thomas Zimmermann
<tzimmermann@xxxxxxx>
Cc : dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, airlied@xxxxxxxxxx, Maarten
Lankhorst <maarten.lankhorst@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Maxime Ripard
<mripard@xxxxxxxxxx>, David Airlie <airlied@xxxxxxxxx>, Simona Vetter
<simona@xxxxxxxx>, linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Objet : Re: Include ASPEED ast-drm 1.15.1 video driver in kernel tree
On 13/02/2025 10:27, Nicolas Baranger wrote: Dear Thomas
Thanks for answer and help.
Yes, due to .date total removal in linux 6.14 (https://github.com/
torvalds/linux/commit/cb2e1c2136f71618142557ceca3a8802e87a44cd
<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/ <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 <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
<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 Nicolas
Am 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/ <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/ <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.
Regarding the performances of ast driver, I remember doing profiling
some times ago, and when running glxgears (with llvmpipe), 65% of the
CPU time was wasted in page fault
(https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.13.2/source/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.c#L534)
But as this driver is mostly used for console/basic desktop usage, I
didn't investigate more.
If I remember correctly, the switch to shmem, is because some devices
have only 16MB of memory, and 1920x1200x32bits takes ~9MB, so it's not
possible to have double buffering in this case. (And this is required by
most desktop environment).
The switch to shmem was done with "f2fa5a99ca81c drm/ast: Convert ast to
SHMEM", and introduced in v6.2. So maybe if you can try with a v6.1
kernel, using the built-in ast driver and report if it has better
performances.
Best regards,
-- Jocelyn
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 regards
Thomas
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
<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
<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
<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 <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/ <https://
xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/>
See the global README :
https://xba.soartist.net/ast-drm_nba_20250211/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
<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
