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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.

5 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. 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!

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  2. 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.

  3. 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...