Simon's accelerated X development thread

Uh, actually that's a good point, I'm not sure if the version of Chromium on Raspbian has been compiled with GLES2 support in. Try it and it should be obvious from the errors if it's trying to use OpenGL or GLES2. If it's not using GLES2, I'll get you a copy of my in-progress Chromium OS stuff to work with.

Simon,

I was just wondering if you've made any progress with packaging things for the Foundation. I'm of course eager to try everything out, so please ignore this question if you're sick of hearing them. Thanks!

Yo.
Packaging has been no trouble - I did that two weeks ago! I've been getting reports back from some of my testers (and some have given no feedback!) and now the tuning phase begins.
It's been quite an eye-opener as some of the edge cases bring the system to its knees. Either applications bombarding the system with one pixel image operations or X chopping up strange shaped objects into tiny five-pixel lines and sending them my way. These incur a mega overhead.

No crashes or image corruption reported though

Great to hear this. Hopefully somekind of beta for general public comes out some day

Well I figure the community has managed for long enough with just the regular driver without major complaints so perhaps there's no demand for a beta!

In my case I know the stock fbdev driver isn't fast enough. I tried running the sugar platform, and it was terrible, desktop X isn't fantastic either.

Yo.
Packaging has been no trouble - I did that two weeks ago! I've been getting reports back from some of my testers (and some have given no feedback!) and now the tuning phase begins.
It's been quite an eye-opener as some of the edge cases bring the system to its knees. Either applications bombarding the system with one pixel image operations or X chopping up strange shaped objects into tiny five-pixel lines and sending them my way. These incur a mega overhead.

No crashes or image corruption reported though

Apologies for being quite slow to get back to you, had a somewhat crazy week.

I'll catch up with your email instructions for compiling tonight/tomorrow, I'll let you know how I get on.

Lols, no worries. I've got plenty to be getting on with! (plus I'm still looking at that EGL stuff too)
Btw do you know if there's any use case where one thread manages more than one EGL context?

Lols, no worries. I've got plenty to be getting on with! (plus I'm still looking at that EGL stuff too)
Btw do you know if there's any use case where one thread manages more than one EGL context?

None that I know of, but I'm not massively familiar with the code. Folks in #chromium on Freenode IRC would likely know though.

Well I figure the community has managed for long enough with just the regular driver without major complaints so perhaps there's no demand for a beta!

Ready and willing to test anything you've got!

Wow i am very happy to see people are spendig their time to improve x performance due GPU used acceleration.

Seems that its not far away from success!

Just wanna thank you guys and keep it up!

Cheers

I volunteer to test in case you need any testers for Arch Linux (armv6h).

Thanks for your work.

Well isnt this just retarded. even if it were closed source. we did pay for the hardware . For my purposes i would rather be stuck with a closed source X rendering driver than using fbdev. I want that chip to work for 2D purposes or my business idea is flushed down the toilet

[jamesh]

Well isnt this just retarded. even if it were closed source. we did pay for the hardware . For my purposes i would rather be stuck with a closed source X rendering driver than using fbdev. I want that chip to work for 2D purposes or my business idea is flushed down the toilet

You already have accelerated OpenVG - is that what you need? This thread is about accelerating the X desktop, not 2D apps in general.

As an asside, did your car (hardware you paid for) come with open source engine management system software?

Well isnt this just retarded. even if it were closed source. we did pay for the hardware . For my purposes i would rather be stuck with a closed source X rendering driver than using fbdev. I want that chip to work for 2D purposes or my business idea is flushed down the toilet

Thanks for the contribution and/or offer of help. If you have nothing to add please go elsewhere.
PS this replacement accelerated driver is completely derived from fbdev. Feel free to moan about it.

stagefright1989,

I want that chip to work for 2D purposes or my business idea is flushed down the toilet

Oh dear, a charity organization works it's nuts off to get you a really cheap computer and a cast of thousands provides you with free software to use with it and you can't make money out of their efforts. That's a terrible shame.

Well isnt this just retarded. even if it were closed source. we did pay for the hardware . For my purposes i would rather be stuck with a closed source X rendering driver than using fbdev. I want that chip to work for 2D purposes or my business idea is flushed down the toilet

You already have accelerated OpenVG - is that what you need? This thread is about accelerating the X desktop, not 2D apps in general.

As an asside, did your car (hardware you paid for) come with open source engine management system software?

its not a justified comparison . Second all i meant earlier was that vendors like marvell etc prepackage linux distros even though wid closed source drivers and yes they charge good money for it. Could we not have had something similar here? Also do all apps use openvg by default i want to use rpi as a thinclient for redhats spice protocol

Sorry guys my comment came out a little strong. Samsung galaxy y uses same gpu . Can its kernel source b of any use?

The X server is the problem. It's easy to get the GPU to do some work for us but we need an X driver to allow this to happen on the desktop. X is not geared towards to using a GPU, which is why on phones Apple and Google have gone back to basics by writing a compositor from scratch to allow phones to target the hardware. They do not use X.
So having Android code is no help, because it doesn't solve our problem. We need an X driver, and I don't know of another device which uses this GPU that runs X. (doesn't mean there aren't any though!)

[jamesh]

Well isnt this just retarded. even if it were closed source. we did pay for the hardware . For my purposes i would rather be stuck with a closed source X rendering driver than using fbdev. I want that chip to work for 2D purposes or my business idea is flushed down the toilet

You already have accelerated OpenVG - is that what you need? This thread is about accelerating the X desktop, not 2D apps in general.

As an asside, did your car (hardware you paid for) come with open source engine management system software?

its not a justified comparison . Second all i meant earlier was that vendors like marvell etc prepackage linux distros even though wid closed source drivers and yes they charge good money for it. Could we not have had something similar here? Also do all apps use openvg by default i want to use rpi as a thinclient for redhats spice protocol

The point is that there is NO accelerated X driver - anywhere. You could have something similar, if it existed - it doesn't yet. So even if you wanted to pay good money for it, you still cannot have it!

OpenVG is a standard 2D graphics API. I don't know whether the software you want to use/develop will use it. If you are starting from scratch, you could develop to the API and it should be nicely accelerated.

are there any arm boards in which gpu has a working X driver , boards similar to rpi ? mali 400 is stuck too i guess.

The point is that there is NO accelerated X driver - anywhere. You could have something similar, if it existed - it doesn't yet. So even if you wanted to pay good money for it, you still cannot have it!

You need to qualify that statement because there are LOTS X drivers that use hardware acceleration, even some ARM based ones !
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Mali?hi ... Chipset%29
PeterO

Yeah surely also mine counts as a valid accelerated driver for X (and on rpi)

[jamesh]

OK, OK!! I'll qualify. There are no fully complete accelerated X drivers using the Videocore IV GPU as the backend. (For RaspberryPi or any other device using the Videocore IV)

Simon, do you need/want to offload part of the code development ?

In any case, I'm very impressed with the work, congratulations.

OK, OK!! I'll qualify. There are no fully complete accelerated X drivers using the Videocore IV GPU as the backend. (For RaspberryPi or any other device using the Videocore IV)

That's where the car analogy fails. Raspberry is a car with a turbocharger packaged in the trunk. The manufacturer never bothered to connect it to the engine, but says you can build it an air-conditioner with it.

And yes, raspberry pies coming with software rendering fbdevs are retarded (think about the above analogy).