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Raspberry Pi's Raspbian OS Finally Ships With Open-Source OpenGL Support (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on from the heartening-news dept.

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.

12 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Can we please have OpenBSD support now? by emil · · Score: 2

    Dear Theo, the Pi allows easier and cheaper access to SLC storage, and there is less fiddling with internal/external boot devices. It's an older instruction set on a slower cpu, but everybody has one. Pretty please would you port?

  2. Re:What is the significance? by i.r.id10t · · Score: 2

    Classic Quake on a big screen tv? Yes please!

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  3. Re:What is the significance? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, 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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    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  4. Re: What is the significance? by preflex · · Score: 3, 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.

  5. Re:Does Raspbian OS use systemd? by preflex · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. Can it boot without a blob yet? by jonwil · · Score: 3, 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.

    1. Re:Can it boot without a blob yet? by Predius · · Score: 3, 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.

    2. Re:Can it boot without a blob yet? by bstrobl · · Score: 5, Informative

      An open source blob would mean losing all access to hardware accelerated codecs as well as certain specific features in the power management area. This means it currently has only a very low development priority as most users will not want to give up the additional functionality. https://www.raspberrypi.org/fo...

    3. Re:Can it boot without a blob yet? by amorsen · · Score: 2

      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 everything, and no matter which options you pay for it stays equally closed.

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    4. Re:Can it boot without a blob yet? by citizenr · · Score: 2

      can your modern i-7 laptop boot without intel management blobs?

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      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  7. Re:Does Raspbian OS use systemd? by amiga3D · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. why pi? by virtual_mps · · Score: 2

    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.