Graphics Category - Page 26 of 27 - CNX Software

November 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Enable OpenGL 2.0 and WebGL for Intel GMA3150 in Ubuntu

I wanted to use WebGL in my Acer Aspire One D255E netbook that uses an Intel GMA 3150 onboard graphics card, but it did not work in Chromium nor Firefox. WebGL requires OpenGL 2.0 support, but I found out I only had support for OpenGL 1.4:

glxinfo | grep -i "OpenGL version"
OpenGL version string: 1.4 Mesa 7.7.1

1 2	glxinfo \| grep -i "OpenGL version" OpenGL version string: 1.4 Mesa 7.7.1

But I found out it was possible to enable OpenGL 2.0 for GMA 3150 in Linux by installing and running driconf:

sudo apt-get install driconf
driconf

1 2	sudo apt-get install driconf driconf

and clicking on “Enable limited ARB_fragment_shader support on 915/945.” and “Enable stub ARB_occlusion_query support on 915/945.” options. They are not enabled by default because they do cause problems. After those two options were enabled, OpenGL 2.0 was enabled.

glxinfo | grep -i "OpenGL version"
OpenGL version string: 2.0 Mesa 7.7.1

1 2	glxinfo \| grep -i "OpenGL version" OpenGL version string: 2.0 Mesa 7.7.1

But I still could not use WebGL in either Chromium nor Firefox, so I decided to install the latest version of Mesa (7.11) with indirect rendering (software) enabled with libOSMesa:

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev
wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/7.11/MesaLib-7.11.tar.bz2
tar xjvf MesaLib-7.11.tar.bz2
cd Mesa-7.11
./configure --enable-os-mesa --prefix=/usr
make
make install

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev

wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/7.11/MesaLib-7.11.tar.bz2

tar xjvf MesaLib-7.11.tar.bz2

cd Mesa-7.11

./configure --enable-os-mesa --prefix=/usr

make

make install

Even with the latest Mesa library, I could not use WebGL […]

November 11, 2011November 11, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration)

OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration) is a royalty-free, cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces that provides abstractions for routines especially useful for audio, video, and still images. OpenMAX standard is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. OpenMAX allows developers to take advantages of hardware media decoding/encoding. For example, If you want to play video using Raspberry Pi hardware (VideoCore IV GPU in Broadcom BCM2835) you’ll have to use OpenMAX IL. OpenMAX provides three layers of interfaces: Application Layer (AL): Open standard for accelerating the capture, and presentation of audio, video, and images in multimedia applications on embedded and mobile devices. Integration Layer (IL) : API defining a standardized media component interface to enable developers and platform providers to integrate and communicate with multimedia codecs implemented in hardware or software. Development Layer (DL): APIs containing a comprehensive set of audio, video and imaging functions that can be implemented and optimized […]

November 8, 2011November 8, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android Platform Optimizations – ELCE 2011

Ruud Derwig and Mischa Jonker, both working at Synopsys, present different Android optimization methods at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: Although compute platforms gain performance with every new generation, getting the most out of every cycle and milliwatt remains a key value driver for Consumer Electronics. This presentation opens up the Android platform and explain what platform components and frameworks can benefit from performance optimizations. The optimizations are illustrated using real-life examples from the porting and optimization of the Android platform for the DesignWare ARC CPU. Both Android platform and application developers will gain insight in how to improve Android performance. Topics that are addressed include the Pixelflinger, Linux kernel and drivers, Javascript engine, Bionic C library, and the Dalvik VM. We’ll demonstrate the portability of Android and suitability of the ARC architecture for building efficiently Android systems. You can also download the presentation slides. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started […]

October 27, 2011October 27, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Mentor Embedded Inflexion UI Demo for STB/IPTV

Mentor Embedded developed a user interface for STB/IPTV demo using their Inflexion UI framework and they showcase it at ARM Techcon 2011. The demo runs on Android and looks very smooth thanks to OpenGL ES hardware acceleration. They also have a separate demo with pandaboard and a laptop running Sourcery codebench development tool to show how to develop a simple user interface with Inflexion UI. Finally, they showcase “Stella“, a self-balancing robot with 2 wheels. The board is based on TI Stellartis (Cortex M3) micro-controller and runs Mentor Embedded Nucleus RTOS. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)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. www.cnx-software.com

October 3, 2011October 20, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Cross Compiling libavg for ARM

libavg is a high-level development platform for media-centric applications using Python as scripting language and written in C++. Bear in mind that are many dependencies with libavg 1.6. I have not built all the libraries required, but instead simply taken the pre-built binaries and header files in the qemu overo image and copied the files as follows: mkdir mnt sudo mount -o loop,offset=$[106496*512] overo_sd_alip.img mnt mkdir ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib -p mkdir ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/include cp mnt/usr/lib/* ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/ -rf -d cp mnt/lib/* ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/ -rf -d cp /mnt/usr/include/* ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/include -rf -d sudo umount mnt The -d flag skips the symlink, so we need to recreate then for all library so that the compiler can find libname.so instead of libname.so.12. Save the following scripts to symlinks.sh:

#!/bin/sh
liblist=`ls *.so.??`
for f in $liblist
do
  echo $f
  fileres=`echo $f | sed 's/\..\{2\}$//'`
  ln -s $f $fileres
done
liblist=`ls *.so.?`
for f in $liblist
do
  echo $f
  fileres=`echo $f | sed 's/\..\{1\}$//'`
  ln -s $f $fileres
done

#!/bin/sh

liblist=`ls *.so.??`

for f in $liblist

echo $f

fileres=`echo $f | sed 's/\..\{2\}$//'`

ln -s $f $fileres

done

liblist=`ls *.so.?`

for f in $liblist

echo $f

fileres=`echo $f | sed 's/\..\{1\}$//'`

ln -s $f $fileres

done

and run it where the arm libraries are located (in my case in /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib, /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/arm-linux-gnueabi and /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/mesa). This will create symlinks for most libraries, but not all. Some will still […]

September 19, 2011September 19, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) Overview and SDKs

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a multi-vendor open standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems that include CPUs, GPUs and other processors. OpenCL provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code for highperformance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices. OpenCL standard is managed and defined by the Khronos Group. The latest version (OpenCL 1.1) was ratified by the Khronos Group on the 14th of June 2010 and adds significant functionality for enhanced parallel programming flexibility, functionality and performance including: Host-thread safety, enabling OpenCL commands to be enqueued from multiple host threads. Sub-buffer objects to distribute regions of a buffer across multiple OpenCL devices. User events to enable enqueued OpenCL commands to wait on external events. Event callbacks that can be used to enqueue new OpenCL commands based on event state changes in a non-blocking manner. 3-component vector data types. Global work-offset which […]

September 13, 2011September 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Faster JPEG decoding on ARM with libjpeg-turbo and NEON Instructions

libjpeg-turbo is based on libjpeg, but uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, etc.) to accelerate JPEG compression and decompression on x86 targets. On such systems, libjpeg-turbo is generally 2-4x as fast as the original version of libjpeg with the same hardware. ARM does not support MMX or SSE2 instructions, but it has its own SIMD instructions processed by the NEON Engine on ARM Cortex Core A5, A8, A9 and A15. ARM claims that “NEON technology can accelerate multimedia and signal processing algorithms such as video encode/decode, 2D/3D graphics, gaming, audio and speech processing, image processing, telephony, and sound synthesis by at least 3x the performance of ARMv5 and at least 2x the performance of ARMv6 SIMD.” Linaro worked on libjpeg-turbo and added NEON support to it. The code is available on launchpad at https://code.launchpad.net/~tom-gall/linaro/libjpeg-turbo Linaro has also provide benchmark result for libjpeg-turbo with a 12 Mpixel image on TI OMAP4 (Pandaboard) using the […]

August 24, 2011August 24, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

AMD G-Series based Ximea Currera-G Smart Camera running Linux

Ximea, a company based in Germany, announced a new version of its Currera Smart Camera: the Currera-G based on AMD G-Series APU. Here’s an excerpt of the press release: The CURRERA-G Smart Camera from XIMEA GmbH, manufacturer of industrial, smart camera, and scientific imaging equipment, sets a new standard for machine vision smart camera processing power. The CURRERA-G Smart Camera houses a single-board-computer built around AMD’s new Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU), which combines the power of both CPU and GPU cores on a single die. “AMD’s Fusion processor means the CURRERA-G can deliver 90Gflops of processing power to tackle the toughest machine vision system applications,” says Vasant Desai, XIMEA Co-Founder and Managing Director. “Combining GPU cores on the same die as the CPU enables the heterogeneous system to offload computation intensive pixel data processing from the CPU to the GPU. Released form this task, the CPU can serve I/O […]