Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Mesa Driver Nearing OpenGL ES 3.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Mesa Driver Nearing OpenGL ES 3.1

Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lmost-GLES-3.1

[StandaSK]

I have an old galaxy trend lite that should be compatible, as far as I know, and I plan to work on it with postmarketos

That phone also only has the VC4 GPU, unfortunately.
Though, I do have a pretty similiar phone - the Samsung Galaxy Chat (also for use with postmarketOS :P )

[[email protected]]

Is there anything other than the Raspberry 4 that could be able to use the v3d driver? Do any phones use such Broadcom SoCs? I remember some old phones using Broadcom SoCs, but those only had the VC4 GPU.

I have an old galaxy trend lite that should be compatible, as far as I know, and I plan to work on it with postmarketos

[metallurge]

Very interesting, PI4 is certainly a new generation of hardware. That is great but the foundation really needs to get with it and focus on a 64 bit distro. I would be surprised if in the 2-3 years that PI5 comes out it would really be able to leverage a modern distro.

I believe there is a beta version of Ubuntu Mate 64 bit floating around.

[system32]

Very interesting, PI4 is certainly a new generation of hardware. That is great but the foundation really needs to get with it and focus on a 64 bit distro. I would be surprised if in the 2-3 years that PI5 comes out it would really be able to leverage a modern distro.

/boot/config.txt
#kernel=kernel8.img
arm_64bit=1
will boot 64 bit Linux Kernel 4.19.75 on RPI3 and RPI4.
Manjaro (ArchLinux) has 64 bit for RPI3 and RPI4.
ArchLinuxArm has 64 bit on RPI3. Should be available soon on RPI4.
Fedora is also promising 64bit on RPI4 soon.

[entropy]

Btw, what is the state of RPi 4 and Vulkan support?

Is it technically possible at all and if so, anyone working on it?

[wizard69]

Very interesting, PI4 is certainly a new generation of hardware. That is great but the foundation really needs to get with it and focus on a 64 bit distro. I would be surprised if in the 2-3 years that PI5 comes out it would really be able to leverage a modern distro.

[milkylainen]

Hmm now that I think of it, I find it a bit weird that Broadcom SoCs are so rarely found in other consumer devices.
I guess stuff like Allwinner and Rockchip are used since they're cheaper, where stuff like Exynos and Snapdragon are used when you care more about performance.

I think it's much because Broadcom does not focus much on the high performance generic embedded segment.
They focus a lot on full scale (Linux 32-bit MMU+) but still smaller embedded CPUs. Network element CPUs, Accelerator CPUs etc.
The "I have a big ass A72 and some nice GPU power" does not seem to be a segment for them.
It's more that the RPi foundation has a CPU made for them, but not available for anyone else.

Don't know why though. They can apparently do it and make a living selling the CPUs for peanuts (RPi CPUs).
Otherwise I guess they would stop selling it to the RPi foundation.

[144Hz]

Etnaviv is also progressing on mesa side.

[schmidtbag]

Is there anything other than the Raspberry 4 that could be able to use the v3d driver? Do any phones use such Broadcom SoCs? I remember some old phones using Broadcom SoCs, but those only had the VC4 GPU.

Hmm now that I think of it, I find it a bit weird that Broadcom SoCs are so rarely found in other consumer devices.
I guess stuff like Allwinner and Rockchip are used since they're cheaper, where stuff like Exynos and Snapdragon are used when you care more about performance.