Raspberry Pi News Archives

For those running the official Raspberry Pi OS on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series single board computers, the Mesa V3DV Vulkan driver is now shipping by default to provide for a better out-of-the-box experience.

Last month I wrote about the V3D kernel graphics driver preparing for 1MB "super pages" support to help boost the performance for this open-source Broadcom DRM driver most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers. The latest iteration of these patches have now been posted for supporting both super pages and big pages.

Igalia continues maintaining the Broadcom V3D open-source graphics driver code that is used by the Raspberry Pi single board computers. With a new patch series posted today for the V3D DRM driver, support for Super Pages is enabled to help with enhancing the graphics performance. In many benchmarks having Super Pages can enhance the performance by a few percent but in some extreme cases can be 19~42% faster.

As a nice update ahead of the holidays, the Raspberry Pi folks have released Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 as the first update to their Debian-based operating system since the official launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 back in October.

After the Raspberry Pi 5 was excitingly announced a few weeks ago, Eben Upton shared today that ramping up the production has gone better than initially anticipated and that these AArch64 single board computers are beginning to ship to customers.

In addition to Igalia working with Valve on AMD color management / HDR, Igalia engineers have also been working on the open-source Raspberry Pi kernel and Mesa drivers for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This work includes the timely enablement of the new Raspberry Pi 5 hardware support.

For going along with the recently announced Raspberry Pi 5 speedy single board computer, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is now available that has re-based against Debian 12 "Bookworm".

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.

Maíra Canal with Igalia has sent out a set of patches for exposing GPU usage statistics for the Broadcom graphics processor found within the Raspberry Pi 4 single board computers.

Raspberry Pi has released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS as their Debian Linux based distribution currently built atop the Debian 11 "Bullseye" base.

The Raspberry Pi team has a positive supply chain update with some good news ahead of Christmas and when they expect to reach pre-pandemic supply chain levels.

The Broadcom V3DV VideoCore open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa has landed a rewritten occlusion queries implementation for better performance and reliability.

As of this summer the upstream, open-source Broadcom V3D direct rendering manager kernel driver has enabled support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and newer). With the latest mainline Linux kernel builds this means the ability to enjoy accelerated graphics on the Raspberry Pi hardware paired with the latest Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code without worrying about out-of-tree patches.

Since last year have been patches enabling the Raspberry Pi to output at 4K with a 60Hz refresh rate. But since Linux 5.18 at least some of the 4K handling had regressed for this budget Arm single board computer. With the Linux 6.2 cycle in December there are several 4K related improvements to the Raspberry Pi open-source display driver for addressing that prior regression as well as making the 4K monitor handling more robust.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced a new release of their Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) as their reference Linux distribution for running on these low-cost Arm single-board computers.

A month ago there was the Fedora 37 change proposal for Fedora to officially support the Raspberry Pi 4, including its accelerated Broadcom graphics and to better advertise Fedora for the Raspberry Pi. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on this "official" support for the Raspberry Pi 4.

The Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for supporting Broadcom VideoCore V/VI graphics that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later is now exposing Vulkan 1.2 support.

Igalia developer Christopher Michael has begun a blog post series outlining the consulting firm's work on improving the accelerated 2D rendering for the Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 single board computers.

For as popular as the Raspberry Pi 4 has been since its 2019 launch, Fedora hasn't officially supported this Arm single board computer with its Linux distribution. But now thanks to the upstream, open-source graphics acceleration finally coming together for the Raspberry Pi 4, with Fedora 37 they may end up finally providing "official" support for this popular, low-cost developer board.

The newest member of the Raspberry Pi family is the Pico W and will set you back $6.

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.

This weekend Linus Torvalds landed the Raspberry Pi Sense HT Joystick driver into the Linux 5.19 kernel as part of the input subsystem updates.

It was just last October that Mesa's V3DV driver achieved Vulkan 1.1 conformance for this Broadcom Vulkan open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Now Vulkan 1.2 is just on the horizon.

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working on the Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer has published a summary of recent accomplishments for this Mesa solution.

Merged today into Mesa 22.2 for Raspberry Pi's "V3DV" Vulkan driver is VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties support with this extension being used by the likes of RenderDoc for providing more insightful information when profiling Vulkan games and applications.

Queued up into the input subsystem's for-next branch ahead of Linux 5.19 is a new driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Joystick.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation on Thursday introduced an updated version of its Raspberry Pi OS operating system derived from Debian Bullseye.

The team at OnLogic is celebrating Pi Day today by announcing the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 built for industrial IoT use-cases.

While the Raspberry Pi 3 and newer have featured 64-bit Cortex CPU cores and even the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is 64-bit-capable, Raspbian OS as the official Raspberry Pi operating system has remained 32-bit. Finally in 2022 they now have an official 64-bit build.

Raspberry Pi OS as the official operating system for the Raspberry Pi single board computers has been updated against Debian 11 "Bullseye".

Linux 5.16 is an action-packed kernel with a ton of exciting additions and improvements. Adding to the growing list of changes to look forward to with v5.16 is mainline support for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is launching the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as their newest single board computer succeeding the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W.

The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing.

A new batch of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window. With this week's changes there is a notable addition for the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel driver, which most notably is for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.

Work continues on getting the Broadcom VC4 kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver into shape for being able to support 4K display outputs at 60Hz.

Launched last November was the Raspberry Pi 400 as a Raspberry Pi Keyboard Computer with effectively a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC embedded within the keyboard and attached to a large aluminum block for cooling. It's a great little device and beginning with Linux 5.14 looks like it should be playing fine with the mainline kernel.

Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon.

Released today was a new version of the Raspberry Pi OS (nee Raspbian) with various improvements over its prior update from March.

Raspberry Pi's Power over Ethernet HAT is beginning to face production challenges caused by the supply chain crisis so now the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the PoE+ HAT that is not only easier to produce but also can provide more power in conjunction with supported switches.

While the 5.12 merge window hasn't even been closed for a full week yet, there is already the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request heading into DRM-Next with the first batch of feature material aiming for the Linux 5.13 kernel cycle.

Following November's launch of the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer there is another new product from the UK foundation and it's not a new Raspberry Pi SBC.

With Linux 5.12 the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 4 will see 10 and 12-bit color support with the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver.

Just in time for any holiday Raspberry Pi purchases, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is available today for the Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for these budget ARM SBCs.

The big set of patches for Raspberry Pi 4 / BCM2711 display support with the VC4 DRM driver will finally be merged next month for the Linux 5.10 cycle.

Going back a number of months have been patches for bringing up the Broadcom BCM2711 display pipeline as found with the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. That work still hasn't been mainlined but a fifth round of patches has now been sent out for review.

Manjaro Linux developer Tobias Schramm brought to light that only single data rate mode is currently being used for micro SD cards and eMMC storage with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBCs. But with a two line kernel patch, the double data rate mode can be enabled.

One of the early changes queued in the USB area for the Linux 5.10 cycle later this summer is a "reset-raspberrypi" driver set for introduction as another upstream improvement for the current-generation Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer.

Following the recent Intel Comet Lake Celeron and Pentium CPU benchmarking against other x86_64 Intel/AMD CPUs, here was a bit of fun... Seeing how these budget Intel CPUs compare to a Raspberry Pi 4 in various processor benchmarks, all tested on Debian Linux.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM.

With the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window one of the features you still won't find in the mainline kernel is the VC4 DRM kernel driver supporting the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and in turn the Raspberry Pi 4 open-source display support.