vulkan News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

August 9, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 gets Vulkan 1.2 conformance, Android Vulkan support

Iglia has done more work on the graphics driver for the VideoCore VI GPU found in Raspberry Pi 4 and other Broadcom BCM2711-based hardware with Vulkan 1.2 conformance, and Roman Stratiienko added Vulkan 3D graphics acceleration to Android, or more exactly LineageOS. Raspberry Pi and Iglia have been collaborating together since the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC to develop a Khronos conformant Mesa 3D graphics driver for the board, and that’s a long-term project that’s been going on for over two years, and not quite finished yet. Here’s a non-exhaustive timeline of the project so far: February 2020 – Raspberry Pi 4 V3DV driver gets OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance, work on Vulkan starts with the basic triangle demo showcased June 2020 – Vulkan driver source code released with many demos working on Raspberry Pi 4 October 2020 – Iglia gives a project update status presentation for Raspberry Pi […]

May 16, 2022August 9, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Embedded World 2022 – June 21-23 – Virtual Schedule

Embedded World 2020 was a lonely affair with many companies canceling attendance due to COVID-19, and Embedded World 2021 took place online only. But Embedded World is back to Nuremberg, Germany in 2022 albeit with the event moved from the traditional month of February to June 21-23. Embedded systems companies and those that service them will showcase their latest solution at their respective booths, and there will be a conference with talks and classes during the three-day event. The programme is up, so I made my own little Embedded World 2022 virtual schedule as there may be a few things to learn, even though I won’t be attending. Tuesday, June 21, 2022 10:00 – 13:00 – Rust, a Safe Language for Low-level Programming Rust is a relatively new language in the area of systems and low-level programming. Its main goals are performance, correctness, safety, and productivity. While still ~70% of […]

January 26, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

DirectFB2 project brings back DirectFB graphics library for Linux embedded systems

DirectFB2 is a new open-source project that brings back DirectFB, a graphics library optimized for Linux-based embedded systems that was popular several years ago for 2D user interfaces but has since mostly faded away. DirectFB2 attempts to preserve the original DirectFB backend while adding new features such as modern 3D APIs like Vulkan and OpenGL ES. I personally used it in 2008-2009 while working with Sigma Designs media processors that relied on the DirectFB library to render the user interfaces for IPTV boxes, karaoke machines, and so on. I remember this forced me to switch from a MicroWindows + Framebuffer solution, but the DirectFB API was easy enough to use and allowed us to develop a nicer user interface. I found out about the new project while checking out the FOSDEM 2022 schedule and a talk entitled “Back to DirectFB! The revival of DirectFB with DirectFB2” which will be presented […]

October 27, 2021November 4, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 achieves Vulkan 1.1 conformance, gets up to 60% GPU performance boost

Khronos has just granted Vulkan 1.1 conformance to Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, and following the implementation of various optimizations and new features such as geometry shaders, the v3dv Mesa driver delivers up to 60% higher GPU performance in Unreal Engine 4. Iglia started Vulkan driver work for Raspberry Pi 4 almost two years ago, with the triangle demo showcased in February 2020, followed by Vulkan 1.0 conformance in November 2020, and now the driver is certified conformant to Vulkan 1.1. While many GPUs are conformant, the Raspberry Pi 4 is only joined by a couple of complete platforms including several NVIDIA Jetson modules (Vulkan 1.2), and possibly some Intel and Google platforms shown as “Confidential” at this time. Alex Bate, Digital Content Manager for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, explains the driver changes for Vulkan 1.1 conformance have already been merged in the upstream v3dv Mesa driver, and should soon become […]

March 29, 2021March 29, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

PanVk – Panfrost gets a Vulkan driver

We’ve followed with interest the progress of the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs which has gotten more traction over time with official support from Arm and is getting closer to OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance with work on OpenGL ES 3.1 on the way. But Collabora has now started working on PanVk driver for the more recent Vulkan graphics API, as part of the Panfrost project. This is very early stage, but the 3D cube demo above appears to be rendered with Panfrost’s PanVk Vulkan driver on Wayland in a Khadas VIM3 board based on Amlogic A311D hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor with a Mali-G52 GPU. As noted in the announcement, getting a useful Vulkan driver will take time as : The driver lacks almost all core features that would make it usable for real-world applications Optimizations are left on the side for now The code base is […]

December 4, 2020December 5, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Mesa 20.3 released with Raspberry Pi 4 V3DV driver, Panfrost Bifrost support

We’ve previously reported that the Vulkan 1.0 conformant V3DV driver for Raspberry Pi 4 and other Broadcom BCM2711 based platforms was part of Mesa 20.3 open-source graphics framework. But at the time, it was still under development. The good news is that Mesa 20.3 has now been released, and there’s much more than Raspberry Pi 4 support, as Collabora informed us the release also included Arm Mali Bifrost GPU support via the open-source Panfrost driver. The latter was made possible thanks to the work by Alyssa Rosenzweig and Boris Brezillon, with Alyssa going into details in a recent blog post on Collabora. More work is still needed with better performance and OpenGL 3.1 being the focus in the months ahead. But there were also many other changes in Mesa 20.3 as reported by Phoronix: OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.2 APIs support Initial support for Intel Gen12 Alder Lake graphics and […]

November 25, 2020December 4, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 V3DV graphics driver achieves Vulkan 1.0 conformance

Just a couple of weeks ago, we reported on the status of Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver & future plans based on a presentation made by Igalia at the Open Source Summit 2020 at the end of October. At the time, the V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 was merged into Mesa, passed over 100,000 tests in the Kronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS), and was said to implement the full Vulkan 1.0 API. So it should come as no surprise that Khronos has now declared the Raspberry Pi drivers to be conformant with Vulkan 1.0 specifications. This was tested in Raspberry Pi OS with Linux 5.4.51 using X11 display server at 1920×1080 resolution on Raspberry Pi 4. Vulkan 1.0 conformance means the V3DV Mesa driver has passed all tests from Khronos CTS and should be compatible with most applications using this version of the API. The drivers will […]

November 11, 2020 by Abhishek Jadhav - 5 Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Project Status & Future Plans – Q4 2020

Igalia has been developing a new open-source Mesa driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 since December 2019 and announced the implementation of the classical triangle Vulkan demo last February. Four months after the announcement of the Vulkan effort for Raspberry Pi 4 (v3dv), they merged with Mesa upstream. This means Raspberry Pi 4’s v3dv Vulkan driver has become part of the official Mesa drivers. Thus, bringing several advantages, like easy to find as it is now available on the official Mesa repository. Bugs can now be filed on the official Mesa repository bug tracker. In June, they passed over 70,000 tests from the Khronos Conformance Test Suite for Vulkan 1.0 and had an implementation of a significant subset of the Vulkan 1.0 API. This does not mean that the driver is ready for production use as they have implemented the full Vulkan 1.0 API. They are now passing over 100,000 tests in the Kronos […]