For the Raspberry Pi’s second birthday, the Raspi foundation gave us all a very cool gift. Broadcom released the full documentation for the graphics on one of their cellphone chips and offered up a $10k prize to the first person to port that code over to the graphics processor on the Pi and run Quake III. The prize has been claimed, forming the foundation for anyone wanting a completely documented video core on the Pi.
The person to claim this prize is one [Simon Hall], author of the DMA module that’s in the current Raspbian release. Even though Quake III already runs on the Pi, it does so with a closed source driver. [Simon]’s work opens up the VideoCore in the Pi to everyone, especially useful for anyone banging their heads against the limitations of the Pi platform.
You can get your hands on the new video drivers right now, simply by downloading and compiling all the sources. Be warned, though: recompiling everything takes around 12 hours. We’re expecting a Raspbian update soon.
This just shows the power of open source. I wish other companies could see the synergy that this can bring to their products.
This little open source board’s capabilities just continue to grow the more that others are allowed to contribute.
I own two Raspi’s now and I’m considering buying another.
synergy of this will not generate their absurd revenue, Money is why and it annoys me personally i’m sick of all the advertised lies in specs on retail products the little made up specs which translate into THE SAME CRAP YOU Bought last year with new words.
This is good ./
I don’t know how much that’s the case for individual chip sets. Graphics cards yes, but they can tweak a lot more elements of those to justify (sort of) the new card. For a company like Broadcom which sells large batches of chips by themselves to other businesses rather than consumers it’s much more profitable to work on gaining market share for your chips than doing lots of iterations of them
Think… time zones… and… dates…
I don’t know. I believe this one. Call me a fool. I call it well done either way.
Here’s his Github repository:
https://github.com/simonjhall/challenge
I agree. It’s not that far out, i mean, if they had said a windows port or something then yeah.
The power of open source! You can play a 10+ year old game you already could if you pay someone $10k! You heard it here folks, the power of opensource.
You seem to have missed the whole point of this article.
You’re an idiot, but at least you’re a consistent idiot.
My whole Gentoo system only takes 36 hours, and on old hardware. WTF are they cramming into that pi?
Presumably that’s the time it takes to compile ON the Pi. You’d have to be have either a very good reason, be very lazy or very stupid to do that.
Or not know how to do it otherwise like myself and a lot of others whom don’t know how to cross-compile.
There’s this site on the internet right, it’s called google.. it lets you look up things by keywords! I know .. amazing stuff! Instead of wasting hours compiling stuff on a slow machine you could use this google thing to find out how to cross compile for Raspbian. I know it sounds far too simple and logical to be true but please just give it a try.
Actually, as good as Linux is. Most packages are not made for cross-compiling and fail in spectacular ways when you try. You do not want to know how many build systems for /usr/include in the include paths.
@daid303
I cross compile on amd64 for Debian armel, armhf, sh4. Having versions of the target libraries to link against can be a pain in the ass but that isn’t too hard in Debian.
If you don’t want to do that you could setup distcc and have the Pi dish out the compiling to faster machines but do the final linking itself.. I have had that working for armel I think. IIRC it would involve making the build on the Pi call the full arm-linux-gnuabi- versions of gcc etc. The point being that using google it should be possible to work this out. You could even do it while compiling something.
So I could click a few buttons, go away for a while and have it done, or I could
“setup distcc…I have had that working for armel I think”.
“it would involve making the build on the Pi call the full arm-linux-gnuabi- versions of gcc etc”
reminds of Dave Barry’s Booger Booger Booger cut and paste rant.
The bottom line is, if you are going to do large compiles for the Pi a lot, then it is worthwhile to figure out how to cross compile or use distcc or some other fancy method. If you just want to compile this one thing, then it is simpler and less (human) time consuming to simply type ‘make all’, and come back tomorrow.
@cantido I’ve maintained a whole Linux 2.4 PPC860 embedded system for a company. Which had to build from scratch. And in my experience, Configure scripts break all the time when cross compiling. And I was usually better off dumping the default build scripts and replacing them with simple make files.
Having the libraries to link against is actually “relative easy”, just have a copy of the whole system on your disk and set that as sys_root.
But, for the average user, this shit is hard. It’s rocket science hard. (And rocket science and that hard anymore after playing a lot of KSP)
Or you might be like me and sleep around 8 hours a night and have a day job. Leaving something 12 hours (or 20) is often preferable to spending all your spare time for a week figuring out and setting up cross compiling.
Installation of my Windows takes 1 hour, and on old hardware.
But I’m guessing you don’t compile it yourself ? :P This is for enthusiasts to try it out immediately – the rest of us can wait untill it’s done for us and then install it in half an hour.
So are these drivers anymore efficient? I assume so, but I really don’t know.
On one hand whole thing was announced ~12 hours before april fools day with a note “compiling takes 12 hours”. With no picture showing results, no screengrab, no data points, nothing.
On the other hand it appears code Broadcom released was a complete driver, and all that was needed was a mapping between this released code and pee IO space (V3D_BASE).
Still fishy that there isnt even a YT clip showing that it works, but the code itself looks legit.
In software development, distcc is a tool for speeding up compilation of source code by using distributed computing over a computer network…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distcc
I was about to mention this. If you happen to have a crapload of Raspberry Pis on hand you can distribute the work without going outside of the architecture. Of course you could use Linux systems on other hardware as well but that’s not as hardcore.
Bah, the Pi platform is garbage until it can run Crysis at 1920X1080 at 120fps
Crysis is garbage until it can run on Raspi.
It runs but you need to pair it with an Arduino coprocessor board to crunch all the 3D data:)
The VideoCore IV processor which runs at 250MHz now has less code running on it.
And the ARM processor (700MHz) now has more code running on it.
And the memory split between the 2 processors is still in place.
There is more FOSS on the Pi, but this could be slower in the long run, because of the blobs that are still in place.
I’m still holding out for accelerated X drivers for the Pi. I know that’s not what this particular event is about; this is strictly 3D, OpenGL stuff. But an accelerated X driver would make the Pi actually usable as an everyday computer; I’m imagining Openbox with Compton and tear-free, fluid window movement.