8 ms·

Vulkan update: version 1.2 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4

203 points by zdw 4y ago

jokowueu 4y ago
Offtopic question : broadcom doesn't want to open source the driver because of the red tape and ton of legal work required Or is there another reason ?
- josteink 4y ago
  Broadcom seems to generally have issues with open-source. It’s one of the reasons OpenWRT has poor support for Broadcom SoCs and Broadcom WiFi-controllers, and in general Broadcom-based devices are shunned in the OpenWRT community. It seems to be a company-wide thing.
  - spyremeown 4y ago
    Broadcom is one of the reasons why the rpi foundation is able to ship so many devices. But I also believe they should, perhaps, find another partner, who's willing to go full in the open source thing.
    - kzrdude 4y ago
      Broadcom must have earned heaps from Raspberry Pi in all in all. Was it a buddy deal to start with, isn't the rpi founder ex-Broadcom?
      - ahartmetz 4y ago
        Yes and yes, they make no secret of it.
      - __alexs 4y ago
        The original prototypes for an RPi like thing by Upton were ATMega based [1] but I imagine with Upton's connections to Broadcom it made some sense both technically and financially. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20111024203123/http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=264 https://web.archive.org/web/20111024203123/http://www.raspbe...
    - trissylegs 4y ago
      Thing is nearly all the ARM-chip manufactures are similar or the same. One of the weird things about the Apple M chips (well at least on Laptops) is you can make the more open source than most ARM chips.
      - robotnikman 4y ago
        This is one of the reasons why I sort of dread the upcoming move to arm on desktops and laptops, despite the potential massive performance improvements. At least it seems like the industry will need to head that way if they want performance per watt on par with the Apple M chips.
  - trissylegs 4y ago
    Linux in general has issues with Broadcom wifi. If you're shopping for a laptop to run linux. One of the biggest red flags for driver support is Broadcom wifi.
  - throwbcm 4y ago
    The story as I heard it is: There original WRT54g that was the start of openWRT was BCM chip. BCM wrote a lot of the software, especially low level, as Cisco was their major customer at the time. Then Cisco got sued for GPL violations that were BCM's fault. Both companies were large and not too worried by lawsuits, but eventually it dawned on them that unlike the usual between businesses, they weren't just going to be able to settle by paying some money, because their antagonists were not in it for the money. They had to release the source, which both companies regarded as significantly part of their own IP. Cisco was pissed at BCM, BCM were upset that an external factor could piss off their major customer like this, and some high ranked individuals at BCM were butthurt about open source licenses having a say in their operations. So a policy was put in place that where significant R&D effort was made on software, in product lines those individuals controlled, it would be legally firewalled from open source licenses, even to the extent of designing future chip architectures so that there were extra processors, not running Linux, that would run features BCM wanted to keep proprietary. So that's why it's difficult to run open WRT on BCM chips. Caveat: I did not get this first or second hand.
orangepanda 4y ago
> after twenty years OpenGL was starting to looking like a bad abstraction: it didn’t provide the capabilities application authors needed [...] The Vulkan project was a long-running effort to define a better, more modern, abstraction For someone who knows nothing but triangles=good, why OpenGL is a bad abstraction and how Vulkan avoids the same problems?
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that OpenGL's API is designed to abstract away details of the underlying hardware, while Vulkan's API is designed to expose the details of the hardware. When OpenGL was designed, the thinking was that graphics programming is hard, and so the API should do the heavy lifting and make the application's job easy. It turns out, though, that graphics programming is so hard that the majority of folk tend to use even higher level graphics libraries to write their applications. The folk writing those graphics libraries want to make their libraries as optimally performant as possible, and the abstract nature of the OpenGL API stands in the way of doing that. They would rather just directly access the hardware. Vulkan is an API that gives that direct access, within the limitations of running in an unprivileged userspace process.
  - jokoon 4y ago
    thanks for the explanation! do you think vulkan will progress into being easier and easier to use? is it mature enough? are there good resource to learn the most basics?
    - sounds 4y ago
      Vulkan may be easy to use one day, but it will probably be because you are "writing vulkan" but actually using an impressive set of libraries, languages and other tooling that do stuff for you that you don't want to do.
      - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
shrx 4y ago
Good, I'll happily try it out in 2024 when I can get one.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Yeah, I've been trying to replace my Raspberry Pi units with other hardware to avoid this hassle, its getting increasingly annoying trying to get ahold of a decent RPi.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Any suggestions?
    - suggestion 4y ago
      What's your price point and spec desire/use case? ARM or x86-64? There are good ARM SBC alternatives with good community by ODroid and a few other brands for $30-$100. ODroid probably has the biggest and best community outside RPi. Used thin and zero clients can be had for very cheap and used for low power, low resource needs. Alternatively, the new ultra low power Jasper Lake CPUs are pretty insane for the price/power and you can get complete mini PCs with "real" nvme or sata storage, dual 4k@60Hz video output, 1 or 2.5Gbit Ethernet for $150-250. Search for n5095 (15W TDP), n5100 (6W), n5105 (10W), n6000 (6W), or n6105 (10 W) mini PC on Amazon. The iGPUs on these are killer and can handle 2-3 4k transcodes too. They make great media/storage servers (that's what I'm using one I just bought for) I love SBCs, homelabbing, and squeezing as much out of hardware per watt and dollar. Liliputing and ServetheHome have been great resources. https://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc/ https://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc/ https://www.servethehome.com/ https://www.servethehome.com/
    - icelancer 4y ago
      oDroid units have been OK for me.
    - LastMuel 4y ago
      I've had some success using this page and subscribing to the twitter feed from the same person: https://rpilocator.com https://rpilocator.com Adafruit appears to be the best resource for ordering Pis in the US as they require you log in with MFA and limit purchases. That is, if you're just in the market for a single unit.
_ZeD_ 4y ago
Wait, is there an effort to run android on the Pi? https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS18/ https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS18/
wronglebowski 4y ago
So with this what games actually support Vulkan 1.2 and ARM processors? Maybe there's a version of Quake that could run but I'm wondering what would really work outside of just tech demos and benchmarks.
- ranger207 4y ago
  Don't browsers and video players use it?
- nfriedly 4y ago
  Well, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, so maybe this is the egg. I can definitely see various emulators taking advantage of this for RetroPie and the like. Also, as the article mentions, there's a fork of Android that runs on a Raspberry Pi, and there are already Android games that will take advantage of Vulkan 1.2 support.
- VHRanger 4y ago
  Various emulators, for one.
- ThatPlayer 4y ago
  You don't need the game itself to actually support ARM. Box86 (runs x86 on ARM) already works with plenty of games, and it will even work with Wine and DXVK to run Windows games: https://youtu.be/JuRZGf7Jqxg https://youtu.be/JuRZGf7Jqxg Also probably Android games.
Decabytes 4y ago
I've been tracking this for awhile and the Raspberry Pi 4 has come a long way since the first triangle! Jan 31st, 2020 First Triangle - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-triangle/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-t... Jun 9th, 2020 Vulkan Youtube Demos From Mike Hooper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygBB3D5vryw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygBB3D5vryw Jun 9th, 2020 Progress Report 2 - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-now-with-added-source-code/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-now-with-adde... Nov 24th, 2020 Vulkan 1 Conformance - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-were-conformant/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-were-conforma... August 10, 2021 Nearing Vulkan 1.1 conformance - https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/2021/08/10/an-update-on-feature-progress-for-v3dv/ https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/2021/08/10/an-update-on-feat... Oct 26th, 2021 Vulkan 1.1 conformance - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-c... Vulkan 1.2 conformance Aug 1st 2022 Vulkan 1.2 conformance - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-2-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-2-c... Lets see if we can hit Vulkan 1.3 conformance next!
_ea1k 4y ago
Now if only there weren't a huge shortage of Raspberry Pis.

203 points by zdw 4y ago

Offtopic question : broadcom doesn't want to open source the driver because of the red tape and ton of legal work required Or is there another reason ?

josteink 4y ago
Broadcom seems to generally have issues with open-source. It’s one of the reasons OpenWRT has poor support for Broadcom SoCs and Broadcom WiFi-controllers, and in general Broadcom-based devices are shunned in the OpenWRT community. It seems to be a company-wide thing.
- spyremeown 4y ago
  Broadcom is one of the reasons why the rpi foundation is able to ship so many devices. But I also believe they should, perhaps, find another partner, who's willing to go full in the open source thing.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Broadcom must have earned heaps from Raspberry Pi in all in all. Was it a buddy deal to start with, isn't the rpi founder ex-Broadcom?
    - ahartmetz 4y ago
      Yes and yes, they make no secret of it.
    - __alexs 4y ago
      The original prototypes for an RPi like thing by Upton were ATMega based [1] but I imagine with Upton's connections to Broadcom it made some sense both technically and financially. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20111024203123/http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=264 https://web.archive.org/web/20111024203123/http://www.raspbe...
  - trissylegs 4y ago
    Thing is nearly all the ARM-chip manufactures are similar or the same. One of the weird things about the Apple M chips (well at least on Laptops) is you can make the more open source than most ARM chips.
    - robotnikman 4y ago
      This is one of the reasons why I sort of dread the upcoming move to arm on desktops and laptops, despite the potential massive performance improvements. At least it seems like the industry will need to head that way if they want performance per watt on par with the Apple M chips.
- trissylegs 4y ago
  Linux in general has issues with Broadcom wifi. If you're shopping for a laptop to run linux. One of the biggest red flags for driver support is Broadcom wifi.
- throwbcm 4y ago
  The story as I heard it is: There original WRT54g that was the start of openWRT was BCM chip. BCM wrote a lot of the software, especially low level, as Cisco was their major customer at the time. Then Cisco got sued for GPL violations that were BCM's fault. Both companies were large and not too worried by lawsuits, but eventually it dawned on them that unlike the usual between businesses, they weren't just going to be able to settle by paying some money, because their antagonists were not in it for the money. They had to release the source, which both companies regarded as significantly part of their own IP. Cisco was pissed at BCM, BCM were upset that an external factor could piss off their major customer like this, and some high ranked individuals at BCM were butthurt about open source licenses having a say in their operations. So a policy was put in place that where significant R&D effort was made on software, in product lines those individuals controlled, it would be legally firewalled from open source licenses, even to the extent of designing future chip architectures so that there were extra processors, not running Linux, that would run features BCM wanted to keep proprietary. So that's why it's difficult to run open WRT on BCM chips. Caveat: I did not get this first or second hand.

orangepanda 4y ago

> after twenty years OpenGL was starting to looking like a bad abstraction: it didn’t provide the capabilities application authors needed [...] The Vulkan project was a long-running effort to define a better, more modern, abstraction For someone who knows nothing but triangles=good, why OpenGL is a bad abstraction and how Vulkan avoids the same problems?

sgtnoodle 4y ago
I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that OpenGL's API is designed to abstract away details of the underlying hardware, while Vulkan's API is designed to expose the details of the hardware. When OpenGL was designed, the thinking was that graphics programming is hard, and so the API should do the heavy lifting and make the application's job easy. It turns out, though, that graphics programming is so hard that the majority of folk tend to use even higher level graphics libraries to write their applications. The folk writing those graphics libraries want to make their libraries as optimally performant as possible, and the abstract nature of the OpenGL API stands in the way of doing that. They would rather just directly access the hardware. Vulkan is an API that gives that direct access, within the limitations of running in an unprivileged userspace process.
- jokoon 4y ago
  thanks for the explanation! do you think vulkan will progress into being easier and easier to use? is it mature enough? are there good resource to learn the most basics?
  - sounds 4y ago
    Vulkan may be easy to use one day, but it will probably be because you are "writing vulkan" but actually using an impressive set of libraries, languages and other tooling that do stuff for you that you don't want to do.
    - cyber_kinetist 4y ago

shrx 4y ago

Good, I'll happily try it out in 2024 when I can get one.

techdragon 4y ago
Yeah, I've been trying to replace my Raspberry Pi units with other hardware to avoid this hassle, its getting increasingly annoying trying to get ahold of a decent RPi.
- amelius 4y ago
  Any suggestions?
  - suggestion 4y ago
    What's your price point and spec desire/use case? ARM or x86-64? There are good ARM SBC alternatives with good community by ODroid and a few other brands for $30-$100. ODroid probably has the biggest and best community outside RPi. Used thin and zero clients can be had for very cheap and used for low power, low resource needs. Alternatively, the new ultra low power Jasper Lake CPUs are pretty insane for the price/power and you can get complete mini PCs with "real" nvme or sata storage, dual 4k@60Hz video output, 1 or 2.5Gbit Ethernet for $150-250. Search for n5095 (15W TDP), n5100 (6W), n5105 (10W), n6000 (6W), or n6105 (10 W) mini PC on Amazon. The iGPUs on these are killer and can handle 2-3 4k transcodes too. They make great media/storage servers (that's what I'm using one I just bought for) I love SBCs, homelabbing, and squeezing as much out of hardware per watt and dollar. Liliputing and ServetheHome have been great resources. https://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc/ https://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc/ https://www.servethehome.com/ https://www.servethehome.com/
  - icelancer 4y ago
    oDroid units have been OK for me.
  - LastMuel 4y ago
    I've had some success using this page and subscribing to the twitter feed from the same person: https://rpilocator.com https://rpilocator.com Adafruit appears to be the best resource for ordering Pis in the US as they require you log in with MFA and limit purchases. That is, if you're just in the market for a single unit.

_ZeD_ 4y ago

Wait, is there an effort to run android on the Pi? https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS18/ https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS18/

wronglebowski 4y ago

So with this what games actually support Vulkan 1.2 and ARM processors? Maybe there's a version of Quake that could run but I'm wondering what would really work outside of just tech demos and benchmarks.

ranger207 4y ago
Don't browsers and video players use it?
nfriedly 4y ago
Well, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, so maybe this is the egg. I can definitely see various emulators taking advantage of this for RetroPie and the like. Also, as the article mentions, there's a fork of Android that runs on a Raspberry Pi, and there are already Android games that will take advantage of Vulkan 1.2 support.
VHRanger 4y ago
Various emulators, for one.
ThatPlayer 4y ago
You don't need the game itself to actually support ARM. Box86 (runs x86 on ARM) already works with plenty of games, and it will even work with Wine and DXVK to run Windows games: https://youtu.be/JuRZGf7Jqxg https://youtu.be/JuRZGf7Jqxg Also probably Android games.

Decabytes 4y ago

I've been tracking this for awhile and the Raspberry Pi 4 has come a long way since the first triangle! Jan 31st, 2020 First Triangle - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-triangle/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-t... Jun 9th, 2020 Vulkan Youtube Demos From Mike Hooper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygBB3D5vryw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygBB3D5vryw Jun 9th, 2020 Progress Report 2 - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-now-with-added-source-code/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-now-with-adde... Nov 24th, 2020 Vulkan 1 Conformance - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-were-conformant/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-were-conforma... August 10, 2021 Nearing Vulkan 1.1 conformance - https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/2021/08/10/an-update-on-feature-progress-for-v3dv/ https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/2021/08/10/an-update-on-feat... Oct 26th, 2021 Vulkan 1.1 conformance - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-c... Vulkan 1.2 conformance Aug 1st 2022 Vulkan 1.2 conformance - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-2-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-2-c... Lets see if we can hit Vulkan 1.3 conformance next!

_ea1k 4y ago

Now if only there weren't a huge shortage of Raspberry Pis.