Include ASPEED ast-drm 1.15.1 video driver in kernel tree

[Thomas Zimmermann]

Hi

Am 03.03.25 um 09:07 schrieb 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)

I see.

I do have an idea what might be happening here. You are using 6.13.1, 
right?  If I give you a patch file for this kernel, are you able to 
apply it (with 'git am') for testing and report the kernel's logging output?

Best regards
Thomas

>
> 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

-- 
--
Thomas Zimmermann
Graphics Driver Developer
SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH
Frankenstrasse 146, 90461 Nuernberg, Germany
GF: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Boudien Moerman
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