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by zamadatix 526 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.
1 comments
fsflover 526 days ago
> even on the Pi

Only proprietary ones, so not for everyone...

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zamadatix 525 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 525 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 525 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 525 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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zamadatix 525 days ago
"Yes" in that the above statement about needing proprietary blobs to boot the Pis is certainly accurate & true (ongoing science experiments notwithstanding). "No" in that we somehow went from talking about "how apps can safely assume to rely on accelerated rasterization instead of software rasterization" to "how the Raspberry Pi family needs proprietary boot firmware to do anything with app output at all" and I've missed the connection between the two points.
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