Gentoo on Acer R13 Chromebook (arm64)

NeddySeagoon

Team,

Santa brought me an Acer R13 Chromebook but ChromeOS is boring :)
Its CPU compatible with Raspberry Pi3 in 64 bit mode.

Until I get round to building my own kernel, its running the Arch kernel with my Aarch64 Pi3 install on top.
Think of it as a Pi3 with a full HD screen, keyboard and 4G RAM.

Its not all good news though. There is no open source driver for the GPU :(
The kernel is stuck at 3.18 meanwhile but once I get userland updated, I'll look at kernels.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

PowerVR

Probably the only way to have some 3D acceleration with powerVR is to use the vendor android kernel and libhybris; it is slower than a native driver but some people are happy with that solution. It is a library that allow access to android HW abstractions (drivers) from linux, it is itself a big bottleneck but better than nothing.
_________________
Ok boomer
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Ab esse ad posse valet, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia

My fediverse account: @erm67@erm67.dynu.net

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2018 11:36 am Post subject:

erm67,

Thanks for the links. I was aware of the PowerVR drawback but 3D acceleration is not high on my list of priorities.

Its running my Pi3 userland. KDE won't start but I've only just tried that.
Next on the todo list is my own kernel, so its all Gentoo.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

Well once upon a time GPUs were used for 3D not for fancy desktop environments :-)

As long as some 2D accel is supported it should work.
_________________
Ok boomer
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Ab esse ad posse valet, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia

My fediverse account: @erm67@erm67.dynu.net

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 1:07 pm Post subject:

erm67,

Xfrce4 and Mate are both fine.
KDE is a bit sluggish. I don't have any plans to test Gnome.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

Santa Klaus should have looked for something with a mali GPU
https://rosenzweig.io/blog/a-panfrostian-october.html
panfrost is making progresses and now is possible to run a GPU accelerated Weston .... and wayland :-)

Does that chromebook at least have an usb3 port for your 3.5" ?
_________________
Ok boomer
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Ab esse ad posse valet, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia

My fediverse account: @erm67@erm67.dynu.net

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:12 pm Post subject:

erm67,

Yep, Its USB3 and USB-C only.
Gentoo is on a microSD card meanwhile.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.