Raspberry Pi GPU goes open source!

[nicholas]

One of the thorns in the side of the Raspberry Pi crowd has been the closed source GPU. Today that all changes. [Eben Upton] reports that Broadcom is opening the source to the VideoCore® IV 3D graphics subsystem. In Broadcom’s own words:

The VideoCore driver stack, which includes a complete standards-compliant compiler for the OpenGL® ES Shading Language, is provided under a 3-clause BSD license; the source release is accompanied by complete register-level documentation for the graphics engine

Full documentation is available on Broadcom’s support site. To celebrate this, The Raspberry Pi Foundation is offering $10,000 to the first person to run Quake III at a playable frame rate on Raspberry Pi with open source drivers. The competition is worldwide. Full rules available here.

This release doesn’t cover everything, as there are still parts of the Pi’s BCM2835 which are hiding behind the blob files. However, it is a very big step for open source. Congrats to the Raspberry Pi Team, and good luck to all the entrants.

Great news for AROS, ARIX and AEROS.

http://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/raspberry-pi-gpu-goes-open-source-10000-bounty-for-quake-3/

[commodorejohn]

About freakin' time!

[bloodline]

The raspberry pi team have been hinting at this for some time now. This is a massive win for both Broadcom (who have been able to shift millions of this old chip), and the open source community who now have a proper base platform

[Khephren]

still has binary blobs? I was hoping for some new classic Amiga graphics cards ( maybe even a1200).

[bloodline]

still has binary blobs? I was hoping for some new classic Amiga graphics cards ( maybe even a1200).

The binary blobs are for the MPEG codecs, the GPU is actually opensource now. I'm reading through the register definitions now!

[persia]

Is this GPU available on other platforms?  A n X86 AROS machine for example?

[bloodline]

Is this GPU available on other platforms?  A n X86 AROS machine for example?

It is actually a gfx chip, which happens to have a housekeeping CPU on it... If you wanted to build a gfx card with it you could... But it would be massively underpowered compared to the cheapest AMD or NVidia (or even Intel) offerings

[haywirepc]

This is great news does this mean that accelerated graphics can work in AROS for PI now?

[XDelusion]

I'd considered getting one of these once, but then I realized that the most powerful MAME games they can pull off, are from the pre 16-bit era.  At least from what I've seen demonstrated thus far. Or am I missing something?

[bloodline]

I'd considered getting one of these once, but then I realized that the most powerful MAME games they can pull off, are from the pre 16-bit era.  At least from what I've seen demonstrated thus far. Or am I missing something?

Anything that uses OpenGL ES will absolutely fly on the current linux build for the Raspberry Pi, but anything that needs X will crawl. This is because the drivers were closed source and X was unaccelerated. But now the gfx drivers are opensource, so hopefully someone will write accelerated X drivers

[XDelusion]

Anything that uses OpenGL ES will absolutely fly on the current linux build for the Raspberry Pi, but anything that needs X will crawl. This is because the drivers were closed source and X was unaccelerated. But now the gfx drivers are opensource, so hopefully someone will write accelerated X drivers

I'll keep my eyes open.