Raspberry Pi's V3D Kernel Driver Prepares For "CPU Jobs" To Assist Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi's V3D Kernel Driver Prepares For "CPU Jobs" To Assist Vulkan

Igalia developers are working on extending the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel graphics driver, which is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi devices, to support the notion of "CPU jobs" in kernel space to assist in their Vulkan support. These CPU jobs are for assisting the support where their Broadcom GPU driver isn't capable of some Vulkan commands and thus needs to be punted off and handled by the processor...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-V3D-CPU-Jobs

[ayumu]

The rpi4 GPU simply is that slow.

RISC-V JH7110 doesn't have this problem. Some 4x faster.

[OneTimeShot]

"CPU Jobs in Kernel space" ... what could possibly go wrong?

[kiffmet]

The rpi4 GPU simply is that slow.

RISC-V JH7110 doesn't have this problem. Some 4x faster.

It also uses a way newer GPU design; RPi's Videocore is ancient by nowaday's standards.

JH7110 CPU is considerably weaker than the RasPi's 4xA72 cores though, so using that to support/offload select operations may actually pay off.

[qarium]

Michael in the past you missed out the GPU benchmark of the Rockchip 3588S

would be nice if you show us some GPU benchmarks of these Raspberry Pi's class SOCs

you write news about improved GPU support on PIs so why not benchmark it ?

[dkasak]

LOL, it's supposed to be the GPU taking tasks off the CPU, not the other way around. Sounds like a winmodem or something

[Myownfriend]

It also uses a way newer GPU design; RPi's Videocore is ancient by nowaday's standards.

JH7110 CPU is considerably weaker than the RasPi's 4xA72 cores though, so using that to support/offload select operations may actually pay off.

The JH7110 uses an Imagination BXE or BXM GPU which isn't that much newer than the Videocore VI in the RPi4. The B series was only announced a year after the RPi 4 came out and the RPi 4 was the first product with a Videocore VI. The real difference is that the BXE/BXM is just a better GPU. Kind of wish Broadcom would start using them but the chances are slim.

[torsionbar28]

LOL, it's supposed to be the GPU taking tasks off the CPU, not the other way around. Sounds like a winmodem or something

Winmodem, ugh, I had flushed those abominations from my memory until now. You can have my US Robotics Courier when you pry it from my cold dead hands!!

[mangeek]

I mean, cheers to them for working so hard on Vulkan for the Pi. Frankly, and this is on the Raspberry Pi folks, not the driver developers, I would rather have an Adreno in my next Pi than need for 'GPU jobs' in my kernel.

[Myownfriend]

I would rather have an Adreno in my next Pi

That's definitely not gonna happen. I'm pretty sure Raspberry Pi is nearly a Broadcom product. I can imagine them licensing a GPU from ARM or Imagination but they definitely won't try to tap Qualcomm for the SOC in the RPi5