GPU acceleration on Freescale Ubuntu

After publishing the Freescale Ubuntu post there was some question about whether it has GPU acceleration. We had originally stated that it did because we didn't look closely enough at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. We hadn't tested any OpenGL ES programs and it turns out they didn't work. Looking into it we found that there is no acceleration for X and X applications only fbdev. This seems to be a known problem with no known solution. You can find out more about it on the meta-freescale and yocto mailing lists.

We also found that the GPU libraries in the Oneiric image differed from both the LTIB tarball and the .deb file as shown by the following sha1sum hashes (last 6 digits shown):

Filename	LTIB tarball and .deb package	Oneiric image
dri/vivante_dri.so	a11bf9	cc3238
libGLSLC.so	9703a9	ae9f4d
libVDK.so	bd5372	287983
libCLC.so	866e63	6916c7
libGL.so.1.2	fb7234	cf2010
libGLESv1_CL.so.1.1.0	b2ea11	d2cbac
libOpenVG_355.so	5ba443	8fb7ff
libOpenVG_3D.so	e70d45	074c87
libOpenCL.so	315629	35612a
libGLES_CL.so	7b86a7	654b29
libGLES_CM.so	94196d	815f7d
libGLESv2.so.2.0.0	b28cc7	c8093c
libGLESv1_CM.so.1.1.0	c3cce8	491d1f

These files weren't present in the Oneiric image at all:

• libgc_wayland_protocol.so.0.0.0
• libEGL-fb.so
• directfb-1.4-0/gfxdrivers/libdirectfb_gal.so
• libEGL-x11.so
• libGAL-fb.so
• libEGL-wl.so
• libEGL-dfb.so
• libVIVANTE-dfb.so
• libGAL-x11.so
• libVIVANTE-x11.so
• libGAL-dfb.so
• libVIVANTE-wl.so
• libwayland-viv.so.0.0.0
• libGAL-wl.so
• libVIVANTE-fb.so

Finally, the file /usr/lib/libOpenVG.so is a symlink to libOpenVG_3D.so in the Oneiric image, but a file (copy of libOpenVG_3D.so) in the Debian package and LTIB tar-ball.

If we extracted the LTIB tarball over the rootfs or installed the DEB file the examples worked. The examples we used to test are included in the tarball in /opt/viv_samples and we also tested the samples in the GPU SDK. We've updated the Ubuntu image with the working libraries so you don't have to go through this process.