[Help] No Hardware Acceleration (EGL/Vulkan) on Weston Wayland - Chromium & Cog Fallback to CPU

Cubie Series
1

Hi everyone,

I am building a Headless Kiosk System (Automotive HUD) using my Radxa board, and I am struggling to get pure Hardware Acceleration (GPU rendering) working for web browsers on Weston (Wayland).

Instead of utilizing the PowerVR BXM-4-64 GPU, both Chromium and Cog browsers are forcefully falling back to Software Rendering (LLVMPipe/CPU), causing my CPU usage to spike over 100% while the GPU utilization sits at around 8-11%.

My Environment:

  • Board: Radxa Cubie A7A

  • OS: radxa-a733_bullseye_cli_r2.output_512.img

  • Display Server: Weston running via drm-backend.so and kiosk-shell.so

  • GPU: PowerVR BXM-4-64

The Goal:
To run a local HTML/JS UI smoothly at 60FPS using EGL hardware rendering on Wayland, completely bypassing the CPU for graphics.

What I Have Tried & The Results:

1. Using Chromium (Ozone Wayland)
I launched Chromium with the following flags to force EGL and Wayland:

chromium --no-sandbox --user-data-dir=/tmp/chrome-root --ozone-platform=wayland --use-gl=egl --ignore-gpu-blocklist --enable-gpu-rasterization --disable-software-rasterizer --disable-dev-shm-usage --disable-features=Vulkan,WebGPU --kiosk "file://..."

Result:
Chromium fails to initialize the GPU and crashes/shows a white screen. If I remove --disable-software-rasterizer, it runs but uses CPU rendering (SwiftShader), pushing CPU usage to 150%+.
Log Snippet:

Warning: eglInitialize failed with EGL_NOT_INITIALIZED
Warning: loader_scanned_icd_add: Driver /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libvulkan_lvp.so supports Vulkan 1.1...

2. Using WPE WebKit / Cog
Realizing Chromium might be too heavy, I switched to cog, which is designed for Wayland embedded systems.
I ran:

cog --platform=wl "file://..."

Result:
Immediate crash.
Log Snippet:

** (cog:1305): WARNING **: Could not load: libcogplatform-wl.so (possible cause: Resource temporarily unavailable).
** (cog:1305): CRITICAL **: WebKitWebViewBackend* webkit_web_view_backend_new(wpe_view_backend*, GDestroyNotify, gpointer): assertion 'backend' failed
Segmentation fault

My Observation:
Checking cat /sys/kernel/debug/pvr/status shows the GPU is recognized and idling. However, it seems the OS has conflicting drivers (like libvulkan_lvp.so / software rasterizer) that intercept the EGL/Vulkan calls before they reach the PowerVR driver, causing the web engines to panic or fallback.

My Questions:

  1. Is there a specific PowerVR driver package or LD_LIBRARY_PATH I need to export to force Weston and Chromium/Cog to use the hardware GPU?

  2. Has anyone successfully achieved 60fps GPU-accelerated HTML rendering on this board under Weston? If so, what browser/flags did you use?

  3. Should I move to a different OS image (like Armbian or Ubuntu) that has better out-of-the-box PowerVR EGL support?

Any advice, patches, or pointers would be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

2

The GPU user-space driver provided by Allwinner does not support running under Wayland

3

​​Hi ChenJaly,

​Thank you for the clarification. Since Wayland support is not available for this GPU driver on the current CLI image, I will stop pursuing the Weston/Wayland route.

​My goal is to run a simple, GPU-accelerated UI kiosk. Since Weston is not viable, what is the officially supported display server for this board to utilize the Imagination BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU?

​Specifically:

  1. ​Does Radxa provide a specific OS image or driver package that supports Xorg/X11 with full GLES/EGL acceleration for this GPU?

  2. ​Or is there an alternative platform/display backend (e.g., DRM/KMS) that is officially tested and supported for this specific SoC?

​I am looking for the path of least resistance to get 60fps UI rendering on this board. Any pointers to the correct display stack configuration would be greatly appreciated.

​Thanks!