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by Narishma 519 days ago
The hardware may be there, but not necessarily the drivers.
2 comments
zamadatix 519 days ago
The drivers are fine for GPU accelerated rendering of the app surfaces, even on the Pi. Hell, the drivers are even there >98% of the time for accelerated decode of the video format itself to boot.

Qube's unique choice in software only rendering for user applications is one born out of the isolation goals for security, not what the software/drivers/hardware could do.

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fsflover 519 days ago
> even on the Pi

Only proprietary ones, so not for everyone...

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zamadatix 518 days ago
Pi 1-3 https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/vc4.html

Pi 4-5 https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/v3d.html

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fsflover 518 days ago
> Broadcom never released a public specification for the V3D 3.x or 4.x series.

So the support must be worse if you prefer free drivers?

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zamadatix 518 days ago
No, as there isn't a non-free driver alternative to compare V3D to. For VC4 (Pi 1-3) there was a proprietary alternative driver... but it was a bit garbage.

It feels you may be conflating the "proprietary firmware blob on the GPU which is used to boot the Pi" story with the GPU driver itself.

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fsflover 518 days ago
Yes, you are right, "proprietary firmware blob on the GPU which is used to boot the Pi" is what I recall as a big Pi problem. So my original wording is correct that you need proprietary blobs to run Raspberry Pi, isn't it?
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fulafel 519 days ago
Yes. Besides Qubes users, a big population of software rendering users is people who have old and/or buggy drivers that are blacklisted by Firefox.
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