I wonder whether there will compositor support this driver, to take advantage in the desktop environment. I had made several attempts to get a smoother desktop experience[1] on RPi 3 -
•LXDE + Openbox on Raspbian + X server
•Xfce4 + VC4 + X server + Arch Linux ARM + USB SSD
•Enlightenment + Wayland + Arch Linux ARM + USB SSD
Although Elightenment on Wayland with OpenGL was the smoothest of them all, it's not usable(frequent crashes with RPi) and since the frame buffer was limited to 2048x2048 none of them supported my 2560x1080 monitor.
Xfce4 + VC4 on Arch Linux is more usable, but is still not as stable as default Raspbian. I didn't see any productivity merits in continuing this adventure and decided to reclaim the memory from GPU to revert into headless[Arch+SSD] for a motion eye setup processing 3 720p camera streams simultaneously with average of ~ 50% CPU on all 4 cores when not watching the feed live(but motion active).
Thanks, but how does Linux kernel ensures that it can talk to all framebuffer devices out there? Does it come with a generic implementation that all GPU vendors support?
Does virtio-wayland support accelerated graphics? It's not clear to me how that would work, since accelerated graphics drivers typically include hardware-specific userland code that has to run in the application.
Indeed they can, For basic framebuffer, but for doing 3d acceleration, to get many nice desktop effects people are used to you basically have to speak their proprietary protocol to the GPU. You can do a little better than framebuffer, like the "nv" Xorg driver, but it's still not really sufficient for composting, video playback and other things commonly expected from a desktop OS.
There's an effort to reverse engineer this called nouveau, they've done a surprisingly good job in a surprisingly short time, but it's still far from perfect.
Well, duh, yeah, that's it :p I am running my Linux host under Virtual Box and I don't believe I have 3d acceleration enabled, if it would even work if I did. Thanks for pointing that out!
You can get GPU accelerated YouTube videos in OpenBSD, provided you have a supported GPU in the first place. You have to use Firefox and enable gfx.webrender.all and layers.acceleration.force-enabled in about:config. I've been able to get up to 2Kp60 smooth as butter on Intel HD 530 graphics in OpenBSD 7.0. 4Kp60 plays and drops a few frames, but my monitor is 2K so I have no need for 4K playback anyway.
They will break a lot of compatibility work, specifically in terms of hardware acceleration, meaning that a Linux user with a $500 GeForce 780 will be using software rendering.
> Support for hardware ray-tracing acceleration has been added for AMD and Intel graphics cards.
Added experimental support for AMD hardware ray-tracing acceleration, using HIP RT. This improves performance on RX 6000, RX 7000, W6000, and W7000 series GPUs.
Known limitations:
Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet.
Degenerate triangles may causes crashes or poor performance.
Shadows in hair are not rendering accurately.
> Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet
NOOOOOO. I guess I'll have to stay with Blender 2.80 for now. Honestly, the situation with hardware acceleration on Linux is pretty sad. I'm a full-time Linux user, and I acquired an AMD GPU specifically because of better Linux support and much better open-source drivers.
Blender 3 taking so much time to give AMD Linux users hardware acceleration back makes me sad. I guess it's not misguided though, they got a lot of attention from the industry in recent years, and that's where funding comes from, so naturally they will focus on supporting the major use cases (i.e. Windows and Nvidia) and improving features. Though I do love the new and improved features, UV packing, for instance, was a longtime pet peeve of mine while using Blender compared to other (closed-source) modeling packages.
This way of using Wayland and VM's seems very interesting and useful. What I'm wondering though, is whether it would be realistically possible to also expose some kind of GPU acceleration to clients in VM's, for example by means of a virtual OpenGL adapter such as VirGL, which itself uses virtio on top of the host GPU driver. This would not get you anything near the performance required for games, but it should be way better than software rendering inside the clients. Do you think something like this would be possible already?
You get 3D accelerated Wayland or Xorg with the open source VC4 driver!
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