Raspberry Pi's V3DV Driver Nearly Across The Finish Line For Vulkan 1.2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi's V3DV Driver Nearly Across The Finish Line For Vulkan 1.2

Mesa's V3DV driver for the Broadcom VideoCore GPU, which is most notably enabling open-source Vulkan API support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer, is nearly ready with its Vulkan 1.2 support...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3DV-Vulkan-1.2-Nearly-There

[OneTimeShot]

Surely we must be at a point now where it is cheaper to use a SoC GPU that has Mesa support than to mess around with supplying proprietary 3d drivers?


I mean... it's a real pain to do out-of-tree stuff. Why would a manufacturer bother?

[MastaG]

So is the Pi4 the fully supported by upstream Linux and mesa?
As in: will I also get accelerated video decoding in Kodi (using v4lv2) without custom patches or OMXPlayer stuff?

[darkbasic]

Video decoding has nothing to do with vulkan... I'm not sure what's the decoding status.

[MastaG]

Video decoding has nothing to do with vulkan... I'm not sure what's the decoding status.

I know, my knowledge of the Raspberry Pi software stack is very limited.
But I always wanted to know if the video decoder still works for stuff like Kodi when switching to upstream linux kernel (without custom patches) and mesa.

[dlq84]

I know, my knowledge of the Raspberry Pi software stack is very limited.
But I always wanted to know if the video decoder still works for stuff like Kodi when switching to upstream linux kernel (without custom patches) and mesa.

What you're looking for is vaapi support. And in the future Vulkan Video. I don't know if it supports VAAPI. You will have to Google that.

[Quackdoc]

So is the Pi4 the fully supported by upstream Linux and mesa?
As in: will I also get accelerated video decoding in Kodi (using v4lv2) without custom patches or OMXPlayer stuff?

I don't think it is fully supported but it is mostly there I think I don't have one myself but have heard from friends it's pretty good state. but it's worth noting that the kinds of content you can watch are a bit limited due to hardware decoder being mediocre, and not being fast enough for reliable software decoding. (something like a jellyfin server can greatly help with this though)

[arQon]

Surely we must be at a point now where it is cheaper to use a SoC GPU that has Mesa support than to mess around with supplying proprietary 3d drivers?

You'd think, but no. Not even close.

> I mean... it's a real pain to do out-of-tree stuff. Why would a manufacturer bother?

Because the *real* manufacturer (i.e. Broadcom, for the Pi4) *doesn't*. That's someone else's problem - in this case, the RPI Foundation, and the "free labor" of the FOSS community.

[arQon]

I don't think it is fully supported but it is mostly there I think

erm - it's non-existent. There are literally only 1.5 pieces of software that have any HW decode support on the Pi at all, both of them carrying *massive* patchsets for it that take between days and months to reapply each time they rebase. Oh, and they only work on Raspbian's patched kernel, and only in the armv7 (i.e. 32-bit) build.

Outside of those two packages (VLC, and a crashtastic version of Chrome), everything your friends think they're seeing is software.

[Quackdoc]

erm - it's non-existent. There are literally only 1.5 pieces of software that have any HW decode support on the Pi at all, both of them carrying *massive* patchsets for it that take between days and months to reapply each time they rebase. Oh, and they only work on Raspbian's patched kernel, and only in the armv7 (i.e. 32-bit) build.

Outside of those two packages (VLC, and a crashtastic version of Chrome), everything your friends think they're seeing is software.

I can guarantee you, they're not watching HEVC video on software decoding using kodi.