Raspberry Pi's Vulkan Driver Has Been Adding More Extensions, Multi-Sync Support

[arQon]

The driver vc4-fkms-v3d has support for the h265 hardware video decoding, but it is marked has deprecated (it still works, I already tried it).

ty - but yeah, that's the case I was speaking of, which requires utterly insane levels of patching specific programs to actually get results. AFAIK only two programs have ever received the effort needed to make that work, and the two were Chrome (which, regardless of one's opinion of it in general caused releases to lag behind by several weeks each time, which is Not Great for security), and VLC (which has an interface bug that means it flat out doesn't work properly on Linux, and all that effort went into VLC specifically rather than ffmpeg, so it's useless other than for kiosks at best).

The fact that it also requires a driver that's now abandoned (though, as you say, does still work) is just icing on the cake: fundamentally, HW decode on the Pi simply doesn't work for any useful value of "work", never has, and hasn't made any progress in what is now years.
At this point, I have no expectation of the Pi ever delivering on the claims it's been making since before launch. Yes, they have a million uses as lightweight servers etc, but they were nominally almost ideal as HTPCs, and they've completely failed to live up to that promise.

I was hoping you'd found an ffmpeg fork that was maintained, or something like that. (There was one once, several years ago, before the author got burnt out by Broadcom's design being such a PITA to work with, ffmpeg maintainers ignoring pull requests, and the RPi Foundation changing their minds each week about whether or not they were going to try to get things working at all, and which of six different ways they were going to do it if so).

Funnily enough, Kodi (or some derivative) apparently works well as a HW-assisted *trans*coding device, but that's about as useful as lipstick on a pig these days. :/

[nist]

I'm surprised you ever had working h265 decode in the first place, unless you mean via the very-hacked custom VLC Raspbian ships.

AFAIK, only the 32-bit Pi installs have "working" decode at all, via the legacy MMAL. 64-bit installs nominally have V4L2 support, but nothing that actually works with it (i.e. ffmpeg). But a Debian update wouldn't change you from 32 to 64, so yeah, that's a bit weird, as you say.

MMAL may well be considered "non-free" by Debian standards, but if so you probably wouldn't have had it in the first place, unless you installed it yourself. I'll probably update mine in a month or so, but I'm not expecting any of it to actually work properly even now.

The driver vc4-fkms-v3d has support for the h265 hardware video decoding, but it is marked has deprecated (it still works, I already tried it).

[Dark-Show]

I wonder if the required extentions for DXVK are finished, or if they are possible on the hardware?
I've been getting insane results with box86 on my rpi4 and would love to try the vulkan graphics path.

[arQon]

It's a pity that after upgrading to Bullseye based version I've lost the h265 hardware decoding and, mysteriously, the kernel module of my Logitech webcam

I'm surprised you ever had working h265 decode in the first place, unless you mean via the very-hacked custom VLC Raspbian ships.

AFAIK, only the 32-bit Pi installs have "working" decode at all, via the legacy MMAL. 64-bit installs nominally have V4L2 support, but nothing that actually works with it (i.e. ffmpeg). But a Debian update wouldn't change you from 32 to 64, so yeah, that's a bit weird, as you say.

MMAL may well be considered "non-free" by Debian standards, but if so you probably wouldn't have had it in the first place, unless you installed it yourself. I'll probably update mine in a month or so, but I'm not expecting any of it to actually work properly even now.

[nist]

It's a pity that after upgrading to Bullseye based version I've lost the h265 hardware decoding and, mysteriously, the kernel module of my Logitech webcam

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi's Vulkan Driver Has Been Adding More Extensions, Multi-Sync Support

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working on the Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer has published a summary of recent accomplishments for this Mesa solution...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3DV-Vulkan-May-2022