Progress on Intel and Nvidia GPUs on Raspberry Pi

GPUs Intel Arc B580 next to Raspberry Pi 5

Nvidia GPUs have been running fine on Arm for a while now—I just upgraded the System76 Thelio Astra to an RTX 4080 Super and am testing it now.

But Nvidia seems to have a partnership with Ampere, which probably leads to their drivers getting priority support, and likely a few special edge cases in code to work around a couple PCIe quirks on the Altra CPUs. Nvidia also builds their own Arm CPUs—a lot of them—so Arm support is definitely a priority for them.

Unfortunately, that support doesn't extend to the Raspberry Pi. And a company that's in many ways the polar opposite, Intel, also has GPU drivers that don't work on the Pi. At least, not until very recently.

Intel i915 and Xe driver updates for Pi 5

The Intel A-series cards use Linux's i915 driver, and B-series uses the newer Xe driver. Both drivers have a couple quirks that prevent them from loading on the Pi, but we've worked around those in this patch against the 6.12 LTS kernel.

For the A750, using that patch and a newer compiled version of Mesa than what ships with the Pi, you can get a full desktop environment and... some 3D acceleration. But it's quite glitchy, probably due to some memory corruption:

For the B580, I haven't gotten to a desktop environment yet, but I at least got a blinking cursor! That's something, right?

Blinking cursor on B580 on Pi 5

All the progress and testing is being documented in the following GitHub issues:

And since I know someone will ask: Resizable BAR support should work on the Pi 5, but right now the Intel drivers don't seem to work with it. We're actively debugging that problem in this issue: Resizable BAR support on Pi 5.

Nvidia driver updates for Pi 5

For Nvidia, every card I test still runs into the same set of errors:

[    6.079514] NVRM: nvAssertOkFailedNoLog: Assertion failed: Failure: Generic Error [NV_ERR_GENERIC] (0x0000FFFF) returned from status @ kernel_gsp_tu102.c:482
[    6.079619] NVRM: RmInitAdapter: Cannot initialize GSP firmware RM
[    6.080914] NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x62:0xffff:1863)
[    6.081257] NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: rm_init_adapter failed, device minor number 0

I started a discussion in the Nvidia Open GPU Kernel Modules repo: Raspberry Pi support (arm64)?.

To my surprise, Andy Ritger responded Nvidia now has an internal bug report (#5053788).

So... we'll see. I'm hopeful this is a simple bug that just needs a few tweaks to work on the Pi.