Raspberry Pi 4 V3D Open-Source Kernel Driver Support Slated For Linux 5.20

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi 4 V3D Open-Source Kernel Driver Support Slated For Linux 5.20

While the Raspberry Pi 4 has been out for nearly three years, only with the Linux 5.20 kernel later this summer is there anticipated to be the upstream open-source support within the V3D Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-4-V3D-DRM-Next

[gnarlin]

Has there been no work, political or technical, towards not having to use a proprietary binary to be able to boot Raspberry Pi's?

[OneTimeShot]

Has there been no work, political or technical, towards not having to use a proprietary binary to be able to boot Raspberry Pi's?

You mean the firmware? I thought that had been reverse engineered at some point.

I guess no one cares enough to switch it out…

[mangeek]

From a practical perspective, what does this mean? Fewer additions from distros' ARM64 kernel sources in order to bake Raspberry Pi images? Does this open the door to, say, Ubuntu et al using generic ARM64 images on UEFI instead of a custom Raspberry Pi preinstalled image with its own special kernel?

[Danny3]

Why was this tested only on Wayland/Gnome and not also on Wayland/KDE Plasma?

[OneTimeShot]

From a practical perspective, what does this mean? Fewer additions from distros' ARM64 kernel sources in order to bake Raspberry Pi images? Does this open the door to, say, Ubuntu et al using generic ARM64 images on UEFI instead of a custom Raspberry Pi preinstalled image with its own special kernel?

It means that you can download and compile the kernel, and it’ll do something useful without finding out-of-tree stuff. Also distro support will be more standardised (everyone uses the same codebase)

[You-]

Has there been no work, political or technical, towards not having to use a proprietary binary to be able to boot Raspberry Pi's?

You could argue that this is a first step for anyone willing to do what you are asking, but considering the driver was outside the kernel 3 years after hardware release and is only now being mainlined... i dont think there is any will

From a practical perspective, what does this mean? Fewer additions from distros' ARM64 kernel sources in order to bake Raspberry Pi images? Does this open the door to, say, Ubuntu et al using generic ARM64 images on UEFI instead of a custom Raspberry Pi preinstalled image with its own special kernel?

Yes. once everything is upstreamed, no special sauce should be needed to run on the pi4. Standard Debian, Fedoa ubuntu or any other should work.

[sinepgib]

It means that you can download and compile the kernel, and it’ll do something useful without finding out-of-tree stuff. Also distro support will be more standardised (everyone uses the same codebase)

I wish I could do that for Raspberry Pi 1, but I guess that's already an abandonned platform.

You mean the firmware? I thought that had been reverse engineered at some point.

I guess no one cares enough to switch it out…

Is the firmware even flash-able on those?

[GrumpyLinuxUser]

Has there been no work, political or technical, towards not having to use a proprietary binary to be able to boot Raspberry Pi's?

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

/ah

[sinepgib]

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

/ah

Wow, thanks! I'll see if I can try it