Igalia Working Towards Faster 2D Rendering For Older Raspberry Pi Boards

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Igalia Working Towards Faster 2D Rendering For Older Raspberry Pi Boards

Igalia developer Christopher Michael has begun a blog post series outlining the consulting firm's work on improving the accelerated 2D rendering for the Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 single board computers...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-Without-GLAMOR

[EvilHowl]

I'm still using a Pi 2 for some light tasks and it holds up pretty well. But sadly it's too underpowered for even the lightest of the desktop environments...

[darkdragon-001]

Maybe they should base their work on the Vulkan driver work mentioned earlier: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...=RPi-VK-Driver

[hamishmb]

This is good news, it's always nice to see improvements on older hardware. I always thinks it's a shame that interest in previous-gen RPis seems to evaporate immediately upon a new hardware release.

Limited GPU memory wise, I wonder whether this is why I often have issues with old GPUs on x86 systems. I have frequently been confused at the poor performance with eg ATI Mobility Radeon hardware and old intel iGPUs.

[timofonic]

Desperate paid movement to make old crap usable. Despite I like the effort, GPUs of Raspberry Pis are a total joke.

[camel_case]

Times back, Xorg was very well accelerated by really crappy stuff i still have here in some drawers. GeForce MX 400 was feel like Overkill for a Desktop, a ATI Rage was running nicely, even SiS was running somehow.

Years later we want to move Windows too and 256 MB Ram is not enough because we need overkill OpenGL to move a primitive Window. Not good.

Progress seems to be: Same Task, much more overkill.

[blackshard]

Desperate paid movement to make old crap usable. Despite I like the effort, GPUs of Raspberry Pis are a total joke.

On the contrary, GPUs on the raspberry pi, especially the first Pi1, are the working horse of the whole platform.
Of course they are now aging, but in 2012 and for some years those GPUs (and the whole compositor/GPU/VPU compound) were quite extraordinary in respect to the competitors, either in terms of computational capacity per watt and features.

I absolutely don't agree with "old crap", everything is "old crap" if you're ignorant enough not to know how to use it.

[blackshard]

Times back, Xorg was very well accelerated by really crappy stuff i still have here in some drawers. GeForce MX 400 was feel like Overkill for a Desktop, a ATI Rage was running nicely, even SiS was running somehow.

Years later we want to move Windows too and 256 MB Ram is not enough because we need overkill OpenGL to move a primitive Window. Not good.

Progress seems to be: Same Task, much more overkill.

I agree about the "progress" statement, nowadays we need tons of RAM, SSDs and plenty of CPU power to do just the same task we were doing 10 years ago with 1/10th of the resources.

OpenGL actually is not so "overkill", it's a "lightweight" library in terms of resources; the problem is that nowadays X.org 2D acceleration (and its drivers) have been deprecated, and modesetting (with glamor) is the standard way to go. Modesetting does not suit very well with embedded world for a series of reasons because it was initially thought for desktop GPUs that embed GPU/VPU/composition in a monolithic block. ARM SoCs have distinct sub-blocks (= different memory regions) for each purpose and making them talk together efficiently is a much more challenging task.

[ssokolow]

I'm still using a Pi 2 for some light tasks and it holds up pretty well. But sadly it's too underpowered for even the lightest of the desktop environments...

I traded my Pi 1 Model B to my brother who's into robotics and built his Pi 1 Model A into a bedtime audio player for my mother which will play anything MPlayer can decode that she youtube-dls and drops onto the SD card. It's been a real workhorse and cheaper and less hassle than replacing her failed CD-RW player with an MP3 player.

[EvilHowl]

I traded my Pi 1 Model B to my brother who's into robotics and built his Pi 1 Model A into a bedtime audio player for my mother which will play anything MPlayer can decode that she youtube-dls and drops onto the SD card. It's been a real workhorse and cheaper and less hassle than replacing her failed CD-RW player with an MP3 player.

If that Pi dies, you should consider a Pi Zero W. I also have one and it works wonderfully well for those kinds of things.