Raspberry Pi's Raspbian OS Finally Ships With Open-Source OpenGL Support (phoronix.com) 59
An anonymous reader writes: With this month's Raspbian OS update, the Debian-based operating system for the Raspberry Pi ships experimental OpenGL driver support. This driver has been developed over the past two years by a former Intel developer with having a completely open and mainline DRM kernel driver and Mesa Gallium driver to open up the Pi as a replacement to the proprietary GPU driver.
Can we please have OpenBSD support now? (Score:3)
What is the significance? (Score:2)
Why is OpenGL support important to me as a user?
I clearly all the stuff I was doing was working before. So evidently I didn't need this.
I don't know what this new thing means to me. please explain.
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Classic Quake on a big screen tv? Yes please!
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Note: it looks like ass
Re: What is the significance? (Score:4, Informative)
It had GLES support with no X11 driver, not big-boy OpenGL. This should enable stuff like Blender, hardware compositing in KWin, or running Kodi in a window (rather than full-screen all the time).
This is a huge step forward for the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi.
Re:What is the significance? (Score:4, Informative)
Why is OpenGL support important to me as a user?
OpenGL is used for much more than 3D, it's used for desktop compositing.
I clearly all the stuff I was doing was working before. So evidently I didn't need this.
it's an open source driver instead of a closed source driver. if you think close source is fine, continue enjoying the Microsoft Windows spy network!
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it's an open source driver instead of a closed source driver. if you think close source is fine, continue enjoying the Microsoft Windows spy network!
The GPU firmware does all the heavy lifting. Making the driver itself open source is a bit pointless when all it does is call the firmware routines which are loaded from a blob.
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> ~~I~~ Clearly all the stuff I was doing was working before.
FTFY. Except maybe a grammar checker. :-)
Anyways, enough being snarky.
Maybe _you_ don't "need" high performance 3D graphics nor anything above say 2D 1024x800 @ 32-bpp resolution either, but as a graphics programmer / game dev I want to be able to target SoC devices without having to worry about a crappy OpenGL drivers that don't expose features or have horrible performance.
It basically means that game / graphic devs targeting cross-platforms s
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That's why I used the smiley :-) to know that I wasn't being TOO serious.
But yeah, it sucks when I don't catch bad grammar either. :-/
If only there was technology to edit a post after submitting it ... *cough*
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NetBSD just added Raspberry Pi 2 support
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/... [netbsd.org]
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/... [netbsd.org]
Why do you want OpenBSD? Their video support is crap. If you want a router, there are better devices which do run OpenBSD.
Why not Minix? (Score:2)
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Why on earth would you do that? These devices are not exactly memory starved.
Does Raspbian OS use systemd? (Score:1, Insightful)
Does this Raspbian OS use systemd?
I was a Debian user for many, many years, up until Debian forced systemd on me. One day I updated my workstation, and systemd was installed. I proceeded to reboot, and for the first time in many years my Debian system did not boot properly, all thanks to some problem with systemd. This was a Debian installation I'd updated every week for years without any major problems at all, and the first thing systemd did once installed was fuck up.
I thought that maybe it was going to b
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Does this Raspbian OS use systemd?
Of course it does, it's a fork of Debian Jessie, but that's not what this is about.
Hate systemd? This is still good news. This means that the driver is probably in good enough shape for you to build it on Gentoo.
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Raspbian is a rebuild of Debian so it naturally uses systemd. However, it's pretty easy to remove systemd and replace it with sysV init. In fact, I did just that when I installed Raspbian Jessie on my Pi last week. Replacing the init software took all of about two minutes.
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Raspbian is a Debian based distribution for the Raspberry Pi computer board. It's basically Debian's Arm variant with specific changes for the Pi. That means it has systemd. Their is also a RiscOS variant for the Pi so you could use that if you like.
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Stop whining man. *Do* something about it. There are many avenues:
- support a free Linux distro which isn't completely on the bandwagon (gentoo comes to mind
- use Debian without systemd (yes, it's quite feasible). Work on the kinks. Help others doing the same (that's the avenue I chose)
- give money to Devuan
- Linux? There's BSD, there's Hurd. They are in need of devels & power users.
The only things which *don't help* are whining and mudslinging. Unless you're here for the
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Stop whining man. *Do* something about it.
I suspect that SystemD whiners do not even want to do anything about it. They just want something to whine about. It feels relaxing and is a great way to release some general stress.
It's like a lady watching Bold & Beautiful on the television. She yaks how rubbish the series is and how lame the characters are. But dare you to change the channel...
WTF? (Score:1)
Yo dawg, I herd u like "driver", so I put it as every third word whether it makes sense or not.
Hint: it doesn't.
Did you say thanks to grandpa for buying you a tech site, timothy?
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So, I'm thrilled that the open source GL driver is finally deemed useable - how's its stability? I've had quite a bit of experience with legacy OpenGL code that "works fine" on NVIDIA drivers having not only rendering problems, but actual crash in the driver problems with Mesa.
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I also am with having a problem with it.
Can it boot without a blob yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can the Raspberry Pi boot without a binary blob or is that still something they have yet to replace?
I seem to remember one of the big problems for FOSS on the Raspberry Pi was that the hardware video decoder was only unlocked and usable if you paid extra for a special bootloader (which covered the patent license for MPEG etc), I dont know what the status of that is now.
Re:Can it boot without a blob yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
The blob still rules the roost. The blob is what fires up the GPU, which then in turn launches the ARM support CPU(s) in the SoC.
Re:Can it boot without a blob yet? (Score:5, Informative)
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Most of the video support patents are paid for when you buy the Pi, both encoding and decoding. MPEG-2 is excluded, but you can do that in software on a Raspberry Pi 2 at least. For some reason patent licensing for H.264 is dirt cheap compared to MPEG-2.
The fun will really start again with H.265 though, since it is significantly more expensive than H.264 and has at least two separate patent pools you need to license.
None of that has any bearing on the open source bits though. The firmware is in control of e
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can your modern i-7 laptop boot without intel management blobs?
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I'm pretty sure it can. EFI/BIOS is relatively 'known' and open source implementations are available. If you don't care about microinstruction fixes which get loaded later in boot (but I think they are not considered binary blobs), you could probably get a working computer with a little bit of effort.
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libreboot has a FAQ [libreboot.org] and the outlook isn't good for any modern Intel/AMD system if you're as paranoid as RMS.
why pi? (Score:3)
If you're looking for open why on earth are you looking at the raspberry pi instead of the beaglebone? Graphics are basically the only advantage the pi has over the bone, so if you take that away you've basically got a bone with fewer I/O options and a lousy network interface. I don't get it.
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Beaglebone is also over twice the price of a Raspberry Pi.
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The only pi the beaglebone is over twice the price of is the zero, which I don't consider in the same class. (No network or storage.) Unless you're seeing pi 1 or 2s for $25? (The beaglebone black is $50.)