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raspberrypi
userland
C2012–2019
raspberrypi / userland · Archived

userland

Source code for ARM side libraries for interfacing to Raspberry Pi GPU.

Systems & InfrastructureHardware & EmbeddedLibraries & SDKs
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4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Source code for ARM side libraries for interfacing to Raspberry Pi GPU.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-10-24 17:43:21 UTC to 2019-11-16 15:02:40 UTC.

0122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
codetrotter·Nov 16, 2019
I think a big part of the reason is also the fact that several parts of the userland don’t compile for aarch64. See e.g. https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland/issues/314 One of the first comments there also say about the RPi 3: > The GPU is a 32 bit processor. I haven't checked, but I'm expecting that there's a heck of a lot more work to do to get Khronos or other multimedia extension stuff up and running against a 64bit kernel than just getting userland to build. Don’t know if that’s the case for the RPi 4 as well. And another comment too: > I'm sure there are certain applications where having a 64-bit kernel (let alone userland) may be beneficial, but I suspect the hoped-for performance improvements didn't materialise, otherwise people would be waving benchmark results at us demanding an RPi-supported aarch64 kernel. I’m missing this
Read the rest
too, and am planning on eventually doing some benchmarking of my own to see if there is any advantage of running the aarch64 kernel for my applications.
In Building a 64-bit aarch64 kernel and userspace for the Raspberry Pi 4
Yaggo·Mar 14, 2018
> Is it actually possible to use this feature in practice? Are proprietary drivers an issue? I've streamed 3D video over wifibroadcast¹ to OSVR headset, no fundamental issues. The exact lag depends on resolution, fps, etc settings. It would be superb to cut the delay to sub-50 ms range, but that's probably not going to happen as it would require major rewrite of the H264 stack, as currently there are always two full frames in the pipeline, e.g. in 30 fps it makes 1000/30*2 -> ~70 ms delay². (Note that I'm not the author of the befinitiv website.) The foundation has released open-source driver stack³ (raspivid etc), but AFAIK they have rather limited resources for software development (single ex-broadcom developer?) and limited access to proprietary features (documentation?) of the Broadcom chipset. Many things work but I think the capabi
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lities of the SOC aren't yet fully utilized. > Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic) No personal experience, but RPi 3 should be okayish for lightweight desktop use (YMMV) with 1 GB of RAM being main limitation for multitasking. [1] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-tr... [2] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency-analysis-... [3] https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland
In New Raspberry Pi Model B+
kragen·Dec 15, 2014
This looks pretty cool. How well documented is its GPU? The Raspberry Pi folks managed to pry documentation out of Broadcom http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A..., with an FFT example included in the standard distro https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland/blob/master/host_app..., resulting in porting the Deep Belief image-recognition SDK to that GPU http://www.raspberrypi.org/more-qpu-magic-from-pete-warden/ and SHA-256 http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/hacking-the-gp... I'd love to be able to do that kind of thing on the ODROID-C1, especially since its GPU sounds like it's a lot faster! I see that they're designed by ARM rather than Broadcom, and there's a reverse-engineering effort that has produced something of a GL implementation on them http://limadriver.org/ that has Quake 3 Arena running on it
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already, and faster than the binary driver, but not yet playable https://libv.livejournal.com/23886.html; but that effort seems to have stalled last year. But it sounds like it was, at the time, limited to working from reverse engineering rather than official documentation https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/operating_sys..., and while ARM has a lot of development documentation on their Mali site http://malideveloper.arm.com/develop-for-mali/sample-code/, none of it seems to be for the GPU itself, but rather for the OpenGL ES implementation they've written for it. So what's the deal? Is the GPU really actually totally undocumented officially, with the only available information being a dead open-source project that produced a half-complete free-software OpenGL implementation for it by reverse engineering? Or is there more stuff out there I'm missing? (In any case, it's pretty incredible that in 2014 you can already buy an 8-processor single-board computer that you can program for US$35.)
In ODROID-C1 – Quad Core ARM Linux computer

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