Canonical Working To Ramp Up Ubuntu Support For The Raspberry Pi 4

[QwertyChouskie]

Ooh! hwe-edge aarch 5.3 is in bionic now! CPUFreq, here we come!

[starshipeleven]

I'm legitimately curious how this happens. USB is a very well-defined standard and the kernel should be extremely adjusted to it. I don't feel like Canonical is to blame here. Is it the guys who make the Raspberry Pi? They are infamous for using GPUs that require proprietary drivers. Seriously, what happened?

I'm not sure you understand how operating systems work.

USB standard is how USB devices inter-operate with each other (i.e. how to communicate from one USB device to the other) and not related to how the controller actually does that and how to operate the controller from the system.

Any hardware requires specific drivers to be operated, some hardware follows a standard interface so it can be operated by default drivers (like keyboard and mice, and also webcams for example) but this is not the case for most hardware, especially in an embedded device.

Hardware support drivers for Raspi hardware are kind of low quality, and the raspi foundation does not upstream shit, as is their custom. This bug was fixed by a random external contributor in their own fork of the Linux kernel in August (3 months ago?).

In this specific case it's not a USB driver issue, the USB fails because another lower-level driver dealing with RAM allocation for onboard controller/peripherals use can't deal with the situation where more than 3GB are installed/available in the system, the Raspi also can't see more than 3GB of RAM when this bug is active.

None tested this hardware driver to deal with situations when the board is actually allocating more than 3GB of RAM, which isn't a problem for the Raspi foundation because their own distribution (Raspbian) is 32bit only, and was not a problem for older Raspi models either because they never had more than 3GB of RAM installed anyway.

[archsway]

On what planet or when do you live? Raspberry Pi is one of very few ARM boards which have fully opensource GPU drivers (and also having full OpenGL not just ES). Praise Eric Anholt for that.

Because it's not like Panfrost, Lima, Etnativ or Freedreno exist in the planet on which you live.

These days, how many ARM boards don't have free GPU drivers in Mesa?
Anything other than PowerVR (which had its code leaked 5 years ago, so a free driver might be met with legal action)?

[archsway]

Raspi hardware are kind of low quality, and the raspi foundation does not upstream shit, as is their custom.

FTFY.

Google doesn't do any better, however.

On my Chromebook, the usb driver often causes kernel panics, sometimes the keyboard doesn't work when booting, the touchpad sometimes stops working until powering off and on again, they use eMMCs with faulty first blocks, they cheap out with 18-bit displays, and I still need to apply 15 patches or so on top of the mainline kernel to get everything^W some things working.

[starshipeleven]

FTFY.

Google doesn't do any better, however.

Not wrong (also for Android it's the same).

To be fair though, Chromebooks aren't exactly generic devices supposed to run any OS you install in them.

Raspi like most devboards kinda is.

[Grawp]

Because it's not like Panfrost, Lima, Etnativ or Freedreno exist in the planet on which you live.

These days, how many ARM boards don't have free GPU drivers in Mesa?
Anything other than PowerVR (which had its code leaked 5 years ago, so a free driver might be met with legal action)?

Ok, maybe it's me who has been living in the past. Could you recommend me some board with working opensource graphic stack under 60€ with VAT and shipping to EU? I know only about Dragonboards from Qualcomm and they are too pricey.

[nomadewolf]

Ok, maybe it's me who has been living in the past. Could you recommend me some board with working opensource graphic stack under 60€ with VAT and shipping to EU? I know only about Dragonboards from Qualcomm and they are too pricey.

The best driver support is from RPi.
There are other boards with 'working' open source drivers, and superior hardware (spec-wise, at least).
But if GPU performance is important for you, along with stability and continuous improvement, RPi is the only way to go, IMHO.
The other boards' open-source drivers are not on par with RPi's.

[QwertyChouskie]

The best driver support is from RPi.
There are other boards with 'working' open source drivers, and superior hardware (spec-wise, at least).
But if GPU performance is important for you, along with stability and continuous improvement, RPi is the only way to go, IMHO.
The other boards' open-source drivers are not on par with RPi's.

Agreed. And the RPi is based from the EU, so you should be able to get it with minimal shipping/tax.

[archsway]

Ok, maybe it's me who has been living in the past. Could you recommend me some board with working opensource graphic stack under 60€ with VAT and shipping to EU? I know only about Dragonboards from Qualcomm and they are too pricey.

The ASUS Tinker Board, maybe?

I haven't got one myself, so this isn't a recommendation from personal experience.

I'm not sure if anyone has tried it yet with the Tinker Board specifically, but the SoC is supported by the Panfrost driver.

You would have to compile the mainline kernel, making sure CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST is enabled, and maybe compile Mesa yourself, so it's not out of the box support like the RPi.

The Panfrost driver currently has most of OpenGL 2 supported, with a few bugs, and some work is being done on OpenGL 3.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

The ASUS Tinker Board, maybe?

It have massive PSU issues from what I read on Armbian forum. To work stable it should be powered via pins on the board instead of microUSB.