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Raspberry Pi Gets Fully Open-Source Graphics Stack

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  • Raspberry Pi Gets Fully Open-Source Graphics Stack

    Phoronix: Raspberry Pi Gets Fully Open-Source Graphics Stack

    The popular budget-friendly Raspberry Pi ARM development board now has a fully open-source graphics stack -- the user-space graphics drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore included!..

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    What's license?

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    • #4
      This doesn't seem to include the h264 (and others) decoder does it? I quickly greped through the sources and only found references to h264 in header files and structures. I doubt it contains code to access the hardware de-/encoders. Does anyone have a deeper insight into this?

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      • #5
        Excellent. Broadcom sure has come a long way since their "we have binary-only linux drivers for our clients, but end-users are not our clients so f### off" stance years ago.

        Kudos!
        Last edited by [Knuckles]; 24 October 2012, 08:51 AM. Reason: typo

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        • #6
          Originally posted by Mathias View Post
          This doesn't seem to include the h264 (and others) decoder does it? I quickly greped through the sources and only found references to h264 in header files and structures. I doubt it contains code to access the hardware de-/encoders. Does anyone have a deeper insight into this?
          I can't imagine them having redesigned the video decoders from the ground up... certainly its virtually the same hardware as crystalhd (aka AMD Xilleon / UVD) - see kernel at drivers/staging/crystalhd/*. Now I don't know if they've made anything to link them up, but it should hopefully be not too much of a struggle to build that connection.

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          • #7
            In the comments section of the original announcement someone assumed that parts of the codec stuff are contained in the non-open bootloader, ensuring that noone can bypass the licensing fees.

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            • #8
              Note that this is *not* a proper driver!

              The parts published by Broadcom are very welcome indeed, because you can now have a fullly open source userland. It is not a full driver though: It's only a thin wrapper that forwards the client APIs more or less verbatim to the VideoCore IV by some means of remote procedure call. The actual drivers are all running on the VideoCore itself and are contained in the blob.

              This setup destroys some of Michael's high hopes:

              Their user-space bits unfortunately aren't based around the Mesa/Gallium3D architecture, although it's possible they could now be ported to such a driver
              Would be possible indeed, but would not make much sense: The stack would be "OpenGL -> Gallium3D -> OpenGL(ish) RPC", so there's no need for Gallium3D to be in the equation at all.

              The only bit that's not opened up is the microcode/firmware, which still must be loaded at boot, but still that's nothing different than how the AMD Radeon driver functions along with some other GPUs.
              That would be cool if it was true. But while the blobs in the Radeon and GeForce GPUs indeed just make a small (more or less) auxiliary microcontroller work, this blob here contains the actual driver, so there's no real way to get rid of it.

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              • #9
                Meh. This is only an RPC-shim. Not even worth a mention.

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                • #10
                  They did not release the driver, there is absolutely no driver code in what they released. It's just header and some egl/glx glue code. Things that have been public for ages.

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