Include ASPEED ast-drm 1.15.1 video driver in kernel tree

[Nicolas Baranger]

Dear Thomas

> You are using NVidia's proprietary driver, right? Did you reach out to 
> them wrt this problem? Or searched their support forums, online help, 
> etc? If so, what are the results?

Yes I'm using NVidia propriétary driver.
Maybe I'm wrong but I did not ask their support directly because first, 
for me it seems that there is no issue with the NVidia driver and 
unfortunately NVidia is not as opensource mind as Linux kernel community 
(as an example you can have a look on my last PR here 
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/pull/783 which had not 
been reviewed since 3+ weeks... and without this PR, it's impossible to 
build open or closed source NVidia drivers on mainline)

Second, I thought I already report it here but on my system using a 
recent kernel and embeded ast 0.1.0 driver has a very poor rendering and 
graphic is very slow, twinkle is high, had poor colors and it's 
happenning even if the NVidia driver is unloaded
The screen flickering is high too and it's like if I was using an old 
cathode ray tube monitor (I'm using an LCD monitor which display a nice 
and eyes confortable picture when using ast 1.15.1 driver or when 
displaying directly the video output of the Nvidia GPU(using HDMI 
output)).
Third, approximately from Linux 6.10+ using the embeded ast driver I 
have some lag when sliding a window on Gnome desktop (Xorg not Wayland) 
and CPU is highly used (some coreS at 100%), but I do not have those lag 
with ast 1.15.1 and CPU is less used (1 core at less than 80% max)
For the moment, I think Linux 6.12.9 is the worst I constat

Last, I found that Linux 6.1.128 is working perfectly out of the box 
with embeded ast 0.1.0 driver and there is a manifest lost of 
performances with Vulkan and Nvidia prime render offload when upgrading 
to Linux 6.2 (using same NVidia driver version, I did test those 3 
versions  535.216.01, 550.142, and 550.144.03 with similar results).
But in Linux 6.2, except the lost of performances, I did not constat the 
poor rendering and twinkle on the screen nor lag when sliding a window 
on the desktop or too high CPU usage.

So I suspect there is something else introduced between Linux 6.2 and 
mainline which cause this behavior.

I'm continuing bissection and I'm sorry, it's not as fast as I would as 
each tests tooks some times and I must never tell something wrong to git 
if I don't want to restart all the work...

Thanks again for answer and help

Kind regards
Nicolas Baranger


Le 2025-02-28 11:06, Thomas Zimmermann a écrit :

> Hi
> 
> Am 11.02.25 um 19:15 schrieb Nicolas Baranger:
> 
>> 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)
> 
> You are using NVidia's proprietary driver, right? Did you reach out to 
> them wrt this problem? Or searched their support forums, online help, 
> etc? If so, what are the results?
> 
> Best regards
> Thomas
> 
>> 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