Some issues related to older i915 rendering on a Celeron G470

[Abnormalpingu]

Hi,

We have some x86 Shuttle pc's and a variety of older intel based hardware out in the wild, our plan is to network boot all our clients from a central local pxe server in read only, as all we need is all the clients starting up, logging in and starting our app (based on flutter as you might've already guessed).

The rpi4's will be booted with raspian (latest stable) 64-bit, with no desktop environment, it works perfectly.
The shuttle's and the older "custom" machines will be running debian 11 64-bit (latest stable) - the debian network boot version is built using debootstrap just to minimize it as much as possible.
Initial testing on the shuttle machines works perferctly after we installed the libdrm-intel1 package.

Our older intel hardware did not go as we hoped, and there are some stuff we'd really appreciate some pointers and ultimately some help getting to work.

We first tried networkbooting the old client like the already working Shuttle, OS wise it works fine, but when we get to flutter-pi and running our app we ran into issues.
Just to test stuff (and without the network boot complexities) I've installed Debian 11 from scratch on the older machine.

When starting the app we see the following; link

If we try removing the 'libdrm-intel1' package we see the following; link

(just to illustrate the intel package actually does something)

I did some digging and came over the 'kmscube' package, just to see if it renders anything at all, which also works when we do 'kmscube --atomic'

Here is the output from kmscube with the libdrm-intel1 package installed; link
Here is the output without the libdrm-intel1 package installed; link

Our "older intel"-stuff runs an ASUS H61M-F motherboard with a Celeron G470 CPU
After som digging the CPU has a i915 (driver mentions i965 but not sure if this is relevant, see the log) hd gpu (apu*), which should be sufficient for our requirements (the app doesn't have any overly complicated graphics).

The app is built on a windows 10 box using (powershell; Flutter build foldername)
Flutter 3.7.3
Dart 2.19.2
DevTools 2.20.1

Debian 11 client is running 5.10.0-20-amd64
Flutter-pi is built from https://github.com/ardera/flutter-pi
https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux/releases/download/b24591ed32/elinux-x64-debug.zip
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ardera/flutter-engine-binaries-for-arm/main/flutter_embedder.h
https://github.com/ardera/flutter-engine-binaries-for-arm/raw/main/arm64/icudtl.dat

Installation is done according to the documentation provided on this github.
(sorry for the lengthy post)

[ardera]

Hey,

if kmscube can output things, flutter-pi probably just does something wrong when speaking to the modesetting device. (Sometimes video drivers have very specific constraints that userspace applications like flutter-pi need to fulfill)

Can you do the following:

• Upload some details about your video driver using the instructions here: https://drmdb.emersion.fr/
  • (not technically required, just to keep the database up to date :) )
• Install libdrm-tests and run modetest, and send me the full output of that
• run:

  echo 0x1FF | sudo tee /sys/module/drm/parameters/debug # Enable verbose DRM logging
  sudo dmesg -C # Clear kernel logs
  dmesg -w >dmesg.log & # Continuously write DRM logs to a file, in the background
  flutter-pi ... # Run flutter-pi again, manually terminate it after a few errors have happened
  fg # Kill dmesg with Ctrl+C
  echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/module/drm/parameters/debug # Disable DRM logging

• and send me the dmesg.log file

[Abnormalpingu]

Hi,

yeah that's what i thought too, my skillset is somewhat limited with Linux so thank you so much for the quick and detailed reply !

I was able to dump the driver details which can be reached here
The modtest output looks like this
I was able to create the dmesg.log which is attached to this post.

-Dan
dmesg.log

[ardera]

Okay, seems like your display controller doesn't support an ARGB as the pixel format for the output planes.

Should be easy to fix

[Abnormalpingu]

Fantastic news, I was worried we had hit a hardware limitation, which wouldn't have suprised me due to the age of the hardware.
Is there something specific we can do in our app to remedy this or is this a flutter-pi specific issue ?

[ardera]

This is a flutter-pi specific issue, but if you want to try running without a real fix in place, you can try running with --pixelformat XRGB8888 :)

[Abnormalpingu]

Allright, Thank you! :)
I will try this alternative method until a real fix is in place (take your time!)

Not sure if you're aware but there seems to be a version issue between Dart and flutter-pi - just rebuilt our app and i get this;
[ERROR:flutter/shell/common/shell.cc(89)] Dart Error: Can't load Kernel binary: Invalid SDK Hash
I was stupid and updated stuff on my build machine, but i reckon this will be an issue for any new users of flutter-pi. I might be wrong though.

[ardera]

np, I already have it almost done

That issue is actually mentioned in the readme: https://github.com/ardera/flutter-pi#building-the-asset-bundle
TL;DR if you use the 3.7.3 engine binaries on the target device, you also need to use the 3.7.3 SDK on your development machine. If there's a slight mismatch it won't work. If you upgrade your SDK without also upgrading the engine binaries, that won't work.

Maybe I should clarify that in the readme, because a lot of people seem to run into that problem

[Abnormalpingu]

Great, I've solved the issue, I just didn't read closely enough, thanks for the tip!

I've rebuild the app and tested the --pixelformat XRGB8888 option and I still get the same message on the older hardware, so guess I'll just wait until you're done.

[ardera]

I've rebuild the app and tested the --pixelformat XRGB8888 option and I still get the same message on the older hardware

Interesting, can you try with the feature/gstreamer-video-player branch? (it should work without the --pixelformat option there)

[Abnormalpingu]

Hello again,

I've tried doing this without much success, seems I'm unable to build the gstreamer-video-player branch correctly. I'm pretty sure it's something I'm doing that's wrong though.

(First I made sure the dependencies for the gstreamer video stuff was installed)
I deleted the old flutter-pi git cloned folder, then did;

git clone -b feature/gstreamer-video-player https://github.com/ardera/flutter-pi.git
cd flutter-pi/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

and I get this error

CMakeError.log
CMakeOutput.log

Cmake is installed;
apt install cmake:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
cmake is already the newest version (3.18.4-2+deb11u1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.

[Abnormalpingu]

Hi, sorry for the spam :(

As suspected it was something wrong with cmake in my end, I was able to fix it by installing the 'build-essential' package.

However, we seem to have a different issue when building it - see here

[ardera]

Are you sure you're building the latest sources? That error was fixed by a commit some time ago

The lines in the error message look different now:

flutter-pi/include/pixel_format.h

Lines 36 to 50 in 8eb4ccd

	enum pixfmt {
	kRGB565_FpiPixelFormat,
	kARGB4444_FpiPixelFormat,
	kXRGB4444_FpiPixelFormat,
	kARGB1555_FpiPixelFormat,
	kXRGB1555_FpiPixelFormat,
	kARGB8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kXRGB8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kBGRA8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kBGRX8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kRGBA8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kRGBX8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kMax_PixFmt = kRGBX8888_FpiPixelFormat,
	kCount_PixFmt = kMax_PixFmt + 1
	};

Maybe try deleting & cloning again

[Abnormalpingu]

Well, that explains it, I did in fact remove the old sources, then I cloned;
git clone -b feature/gstreamer-video-player https://github.com/ardera/flutter-pi.git
Took a look at the source files and they are indeed not updated.

I looked around at the other branches and found a recently updated one;
git clone -b feature/gstreamer-player-from-pipeline https://github.com/ardera/flutter-pi.git

It builds allthough I'm getting a lot of warnings, but it completed, was able to 'make install', and what do you know, tried starting our flutter app and it works!

Amazing work, thank you so much for the help and patience!

[ardera]

Nice! Glad it works now!

Can you send me the warnings you're getting?

[Abnormalpingu]

Absolutely,
here are the warnings :)