Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPUs has come a long way, and Hardkernel’s ODROID-N2+ board now supports Ubuntu 21.10 and Chromium OS with 3D graphics acceleration through the Panfrost driver.
As a reminder, ODROID-N2+ is a single board computer powered by an Amlogic S922X Rev.C processor clocked at 2.4GHz with an Arm Mali-G52 GPU, with up to 4GB RAM, and which comes with HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, plus a GPIO header.
ODROID-N2+ with Ubuntu 21.10 + Panfrost
Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indiri is supposed to be released on October 14, 2021 together with Gnome 40, but Hardkernel released a development version as early as August, with Linux 5.14 and Panfrost GPU acceleration as you can see from the screenshot above.
The Ubuntu 21.10 image for ODROID-N2+ and the earlier ODROID-N2 SBC cannot be found in the Wiki just yet, but should be there by October 14 or shortly after. A screenshot shows Ubuntu Impish Indri (development branch) or Ubuntu 21.10 booting from Petitboot, but I could not find the image itself at this time.
Ubuntu 21.10 desktop OS with Panfrost should be well supported, as the open-source GPU driver has been officially part of the recent Mesa 20.3 and Debian 11 releases. I should also get an ODROID-N2+ board by the end of October to hopefully confirm that.
Chromium OS + Panfrost on ODROID N2+
Besides the Ubuntu 21.10 image officially supported by Hardkernel, forum member “AreaScout” also prepared a Chromium OS image with the Panfrost driver running on ODROID-N2(+) SBC.
He explains he has successfully built and patched the Chromium browser to run Ozone-gbm abstraction layer with the Aura window system with Panfrost GPU drivers. Ozone is a platform abstraction layer beneath the Aura window system that is used for low-level input and graphics, and that supports the new X11-alternative window systems on Linux such as Wayland or Mir.
There’s no Chromium OS image yet perse, but you’ll find the instructions in the forum, which involves installing Debian 11 from Armbian website, the latest Mesa driver, and pre-compiled Chromium OS package, before starting Chromium in the command line. It feels more like Debian with Chromium browser, but as you’ll see from the video below, the Chromium OS interface is indeed running.
In the discussion, you’ll find some issues with getting the mouse cursor to work (now fixed), and the Google Play store does not work. I’m not sure the latter is really feasible on a non-official Chrome OS device.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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This is a very good news.
Wish they could get 2.4 GHz, from their S905X3 devices 😀
I think that anybody can build ubuntu 21.04 with armbian for odroid boards. And idealy everything should work just fine 🙂
Same as on armbian…. but panfrost works horrible on G52 on master mesa right now. I already posted on mesa issue tracker. Its not usable since months. At least on cinnamon. Everything is glitchy. Similar happened on KDE..
And where are those pre compiled packages now?? The files are lost… which is sad..
I haven’t checked myself, but you may want to try the Ubuntu 22.04 image instead: https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=44177