Raspberry Pi VC4 3D Acceleration Should Come To Linux 4.5

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi VC4 3D Acceleration Should Come To Linux 4.5

While the Raspberry Pi DRM driver landed for Linux 4.4, with this forthcoming kernel release it doesn't expose any 3D hardware acceleration. However, it looks like that's coming for Linux 4.5..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-3D-Linux-4.5

[Veto]

Benchmarks please - or it didn't happen :-)

[bcdonadio]

This means that we can now boot Raspberry Pi blob-free?

[oibaf]

Nice, someone should update this page: http://elinux.org/RPi_Upstreaming

[W.Irrkopf]

This means that we can now boot Raspberry Pi blob-free?

If I understand the PI's architecture correctly: No.
The PI uses the GPU for initial boot. Only after the hardware has been initialized (a bit) does it hand over control to the CPU (think of it as BIOS + low level part of the bood loader). So the size of the blob could be significantly reduced (no more GFX stuff) but still very much essential.

[kmare]

ok, got a few questions:
- is the open source driver going to miss some features compared to the blob?
- will/can the video performance be good enough for kodi (with vdpau or whatever) @1080p?
- are there any news about the wayland port of the driver as seen here?

Thank you!

[bstrobl]

Once the 3D driver along with all of the components are upstreamed, the kernel on the ARM can take over all the graphics work.
It will even have things like desktop OpenGL which is currently unavailable on the Pi.

So basically:
1. Kernel can prepare all 3D Tasks and send them directly to the QPUs (graphics cores)
2. VPU (small coprocessor) is then only needed for boot up (and maybe hardware codecs, not sure about that one)
3. Blob now only needs to have minimal boot code for the VPU instead of an RTOS. Might even be open sourced if small and simple enough.

Performance might suffer a bit (around 5% on ARMv6 according to Eric Anholt).
Without hardware codecs for video it will definitely suffer unless you have a Pi 2 and use software decoding on the ARM A7s.
Foundation is awaiting the completion of the 3D driver before progressing with Wayland.

[Ancurio]

ok, got a few questions:
- are there any news about the wayland port of the driver as seen here?

That makes no sense. The driver has nothing to do with Wayland.

[kmare]

That makes no sense. The driver has nothing to do with Wayland.

I know that, shouldn't have said "port". Was just wondering about the status of that driver.