Raspbian Still Being Tuned For Greater VC4 Performance

Eric Anholt has written his usual weekly update concerning his happenings on the open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi devices and other Broadcom-powered hardware.

Over the past week, his biggest milestone was going public with the new VC5 driver stack for future Broadcom graphics IP. And now, of course, wild speculation of a future Raspberry Pi potentially getting this much more powerful successor to VC4.

Besides getting VC5 cleaned up for public release, Eric had also been working on fixing performance regressions for Raspbian. In particular, when this Debian GNU/Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi switches from software rendering to using VC4 without a compositor enabled.

There can be some slow window dragging, but Eric has been working to optimize GLAMOR to perform better with tile-based hardware and does have some new patches available for testing that make the experience smoother although not yet perfect.

More details via this blog post.