Emulation station not starting on manual install to PI alternative

gitface

Hi all, hope you might be able to help.

So I recently got a Pi alterative board (link: here ) and screen (link: here ) based on the CM4 form factor with the adaptor and based on the Allwinner H616 Cortex-A53 chip. Now this is going to end up being the brains of a 3D printer but since I don't need to install it just yet I thought I'd have a play with the hardware to see how viable it would be for a handheld gaming device due to Raspberry Pi being like Rocking Horse Poo at the moment.

They provide two distros on their github one for 3d printers and then a minimal Debian 11 Bullseye distro. So I started with the minimal distro and then followed the info from the RetroPie doc's for manually installing on Debian and after a while setup completed with the only error reported at the end was that the N64 emulator failed to install.

I rebooted the board and then tried to run Emulation Station and the below error was reported.

The path /dev/dri/ cannot be opened or is not available
The path /dev/dri/ cannot be opened or is not available
Feb 22 17:23:08 lvl0:   Error initializing SDL!
        No available video device
Feb 22 17:23:08 lvl0:   Renderer failed to initialize!
Feb 22 17:23:08 lvl0:   Window failed to initialize!

After some searching my suspicion was no graphics drivers installed, but checking the PermaFrost libraries containing the driver for the Mali G31 GPU were installed.

So if anyone has any ideas it would be much appreciated.

G.

mitu

@gitface said in Emulation station not starting on manual install to PI alternative:

After some searching my suspicion was no graphics drivers installed, but checking the PermaFrost libraries containing the driver for the Mali G31 GPU were installed.

I assume you're referring to the Panfrost Mesa GPU driver. Libraries being installed doesn't mean you have a functioning GPU setup.
Is the desktop working on this system ? How about other GL(ES) applications like glmark2 or glxinfo ?

gitface

As I said in the original post, its a minimal distro so no desktop environment.

glmark2: command not found
glxinfo: unable to open display

mitu

@gitface said in Emulation station not starting on manual install to PI alternative:

As I said in the original post, its a minimal distro so no desktop environment.

Ok, if the desktop env is not installed, then how did you check that the GPU drivers are working ? I assumed you did install some extra packages (as the GPU drivers' packages).

glmark2: command not found
glxinfo: unable to open display

OK.

gitface

using command line

mitu

@gitface Can you be more specific ?

Did you run any command(s) to check the GPU drivers are working ? Which command and what's the output ?

gitface

only the ones you mentioned (these are also the only ones I came across during my search's) as shown above

gizmo98

@gitface what is the output of „ls /dev/dri“ and „lsmod“? If you run your setup without graphical interface (xorg) install kmscube with „apt install kmscube“ and try to run it with „kmscube“.

Kernellog should contain panfrost if open source driver is used. You can check it with „dmesg | grep panfrost“.

gitface

So I've just reflashed the distro to start from a clean system and run what you asked,

So "ls /dev/dri" gives

ls: cannot access '/dev/dri': No such file or directory

"lsmod" gives

Module                  Size  Used by
zram                   32768  2
nls_iso8859_1          16384  1
8189fs               1187840  0
cfg80211              352256  1 8189fs
sun50iw9_codec         28672  3
joydev                 32768  0
display_connector      20480  0
fuse                  126976  1
hid_logitech_hidpp     45056  0
i2c_mv64xxx            24576  0
hid_logitech_dj        32768  0

and finally installing kmscube and running it I get

drmGetDevices2 failed: No such file or directory
could not open drm device
failed to initialize legacy DRM

"dmesg | grep panfrost" does nothing which since kmscube failed to run is expected.

gizmo98

@gitface I have bad news. The vendor kernel has no panfrost drm driver. I cannot find the panfrost directory in /drivers/gpu/drm https://github.com/bigtreetech/CB1-Kernel/tree/kernel-5.16/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm.

According to the device tree panfrost driver should be used for the gpu. https://github.com/bigtreetech/CB1-Kernel/blob/69110e86c7d6abf3860b12aa8e6682f818be4900/kernel/arch/arm64/boot/dts/allwinner/sun50i-h616.dtsi#L1177

gitface

So essentially to get this to work I would have to compile a version of the kernal with the PanFrost files included.

I'm thinking that this would be easier, considering my linux-fu is scraping by level, to go with an actual pi or something like an orange pi.

At least it works for my original purpose for a 3D printer were everything is done via ssh or web interface.

Anyway, cheers for the help.