I've recently gotten hold of an ARM-based Chromebook C100P. After successfully installing ArchLinuxARM, I've struggled to enable the Mali-T764 GPU. The recommended drivers for the device, (xf86-video-armsoc-rockchip and veyron-libgl) don't register properly within Xorg, leading to encounters with the following errors:
Can't set the DRM interface version
Can't open a connection with the DRM - Permission denied
This isn't an issue regarding privileges because startx was launched as root.
Other combinations such as using lightdm as the launcher, or just using the xf86-video-fbdev driver instead of those recommended allow me to achieve a graphics context, but none of these are hardware accelerated; they merely achieve direct rendering via llvmpipe. This is confirmed via mesa-demos's glxinfo.
I've found ARM's driver page and I'm planning to install the specific driver for my GPU, butI'm at a loss of where to begin. The downloadable library contains a bunch of .so files, but I have no idea how to integrate these within Arch; I'd appreciate if anyone is able to offer a suitable procedure.
.sofiles are Shared Object files, essentially shared libraries with functions and routines which applications can link to and use, without having to implement them directly. From the description above the download links on the page, they seem to only provide part of the driver and are designed to work with other kernel ones - however, I cannot comment on that. – Joe Mar 24 '16 at 21:15