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Galaxy S8 Exynos variant not working in gear vr?

Apr 27, 2017 Cubits link
I'm getting a strange problem which always ends in a crash. When i "mouse over" a button in the menu i get some kind of graphical artefacting, like a blocky kind of screen tearing. It looks like when a satellite streamed broadcast loses signal.

I can get through the menus, but once in space it will only last a few seconds before crashing completely.

I'm not sure if the problem is unique to the Exynos chipset, or if it's all s8's. Nothing i can do has worked on this device.
Apr 28, 2017 incarnate link
There's a bug in the Mali driver on the Exynos version of the S8, which is basically reading memory from some random location way outside of where it should.

We have reported the bug to ARM, Samsung and Oculus, but because we don't have a workaround or a solution yet because:

1) It's deep in the GPU driver, way outside our codebase, we can't debug it and we have no idea what's happening. It's in the glDrawElements call, which is pretty fundamental to "rendering stuff on the screen".

2) We don't have one of these "International" Exynos S8 devices in-house. Even if we did, it would be a blind debugging process of trial and error to see if we could get it to work.. we're really dependent on ARM debugging the true nature of the problem and giving us a workaround.

In the meantime, we've temporarily excluded all S8 devices from the Play Store (we can't tell which are Qualcomm and which are Exynos by model number, and Google has zero info), and we're trying to get Oculus to temporarily exclude Exynos devices from the Gear VR store.. but we have no idea if they'll do that.

Tonight we're pushing an updated Gear VR version with a warning pop-up, if it detects the Mali-G71 GPU. That's about the best we can do for the moment.