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   bp@www.zefox.net wrote:   
   > Scott Alfter wrote:   
   >> In article , wrote:   
   >>>One thing I hadn't considered until now is migrating away from   
   >>>RasPiOS to something else. Are there any alternatives that offer   
   >>>comparable support that will run on the Pi5?   
   >>   
   >> It depends on what you want to do.   
   >   
   > Probably browser performance is the main bottleneck. Far as I know   
   > the RasPiOS version of chromium is the only browser that exploits   
   > the VideoCore portion of the Pi.   
      
   Via Mesa drivers, hardware 3D graphics rendering should be supported   
   in Firefox just like on PC, this has been the case for years. Check   
   the details on the about:support page to see whether Firefox on your   
   RPi has detected that it's available.   
      
   Of course it's really a matter of what you mean by "exploits". Even   
   pure framebuffer mode uses "the VideoCore portion of the Pi", so   
   what specific exploitation are you looking for?   
      
   > Is this still true?   
      
   I believe Chromium has HW video decoding on the Pi (not sure about   
   encoding), so that's probably what you mean. A quick search for   
   "Raspberry pi firefox hardware video decoding" brings up many   
   results announcing that support was added in Firefox 116. Note that   
   this means it's not available in the current Firefox ESR releases,   
   if you're using them.   
      
   > It's been a genuine dissapointment that Broadcom failed to open   
   > VideoCore in a useful way. It's most of the Pi's horsepower. Or,   
   > am I being unfair?   
      
   If you're talking about video en/decoding, then yes that's a bit   
   unfair because Broadcom have made the APIs for common functionality   
   like that available. Also the Raspberry Pi developers have access to   
   all the secret documentation and development kits from Broadcom, and   
   it's the code that they've written for their fork of the Linux   
   kernel which has become some of the unofficial open-source reference   
   material for talking to the RPi's GPU. As the ones selling the   
   product, traditionally it's their job to submit code to projects   
   like Firefox to help get it supported if they so desire, or fork   
   them like they've done with the Linux kernel. Actually Firefox is   
   apparantly using a Linux kernel interface for this video decoding   
   support, so the RPi developers have up an API as conveniently as   
   possible and left the Firefox developers to take the last step of   
   using it at their end (quite a few years after Chromium, VLC,   
   FFmpeg, etc. did). So you could blame Mozilla too for being so   
   slow. Take your pick.   
      
   What Broadcom would enable by fully open-sourcing their GPU code   
   and documentation is that the firmware that these APIs talk to   
   could be expanded as well. Then extra GPU-accellerated functions   
   could be written such as for newer video codecs, or other things   
   entirely. By publishing the documentation for the QPU units in the   
   VideoCore IV GPUs Broadcom did open some doors towards that, but   
   it's not really enough information for a full open-source GPU   
   firmware to be independently developed (there's a project for that   
   with VideoCore IV, but it stalled years ago).   
      
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