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posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-only-way-to-win-is-play dept.

FrogBlast writes:

"Last week, Broadcom released the full source of the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 driver stack for the Broadcom VideoCore IV 3D graphics core, which they provide under a 3-clause BSD license. The VideoCore IV core is used in many of Broadcom's processors, including the BCM2835 chip, which is used in the Raspberry Pi.

But because the release targets the BCM21553 3G cellphone chip, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to port it to the BCM2835 chip and successfully run Quake III 'at a resolution of 1920-1080 and a minimum of 20fps, without making use of the capabilities of the blob'. The port, it says, 'should be reasonably straightforward' to accomplish."

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:21PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:21PM (#10779) Journal

    Do we get to see an incredibly unstable rushed-out-the-door-to-make-a-profit port that technically meets the requirements? Or is it sufficiently low a bounty that someone who would work on it anyways says to themselves "Might as well finish, it's a lot of money?"

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hubie on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:33PM

      by hubie (1068) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:33PM (#10795) Journal

      The rushed-out-the-door version would still have merit in that the startup effort has been done and one could patch what was there. Of course, if the foundation for the code was so shaky that it really warranted a complete re-write, then you're back to square one, but that would also be true of any version put forward.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by WizardFusion on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:25PM

    by WizardFusion (498) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:25PM (#10785) Journal

    Looking at the following pages, they look like completely different chips to me.? Is this even possible.?

    http://www.broadcom.com/products/Cellular/3G-Baseb and-Processors/BCM21553/ [broadcom.com]
    http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835/ [broadcom.com]

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by WizardFusion on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:29PM

      by WizardFusion (498) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:29PM (#10792) Journal

      Replying to myself:
      Apparently it can be done, TFA states it should be possible:

      Experienced programmers can:
      Develop fully open drivers for other VideoCore devices, including the Raspberry Pi’s BCM2835 and the BCM21654 (a low-cost 3G integrated baseband for emerging markets).

    • (Score: 1) by loufoque on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:37PM

      by loufoque (2544) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:37PM (#10898)

      Both look like error 404 to me.

      • (Score: 1) by Toaster42 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:59PM

        by Toaster42 (3581) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:59PM (#10912) Homepage

        Me too... Soylent Effect?

        --
        All higher forms of thinking come from neural connections built by solving the kinds of problems encountered in math.-Md
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by cmn32480 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:48PM

    by cmn32480 (443) <cmn32480NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:48PM (#10812) Journal

    I guess if you have to have a metric, that is as good an answer as any other.

    Anybody have any insight as to why Quake III? Why not Doom or Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

    --
    "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by egcagrac0 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:00PM

      by egcagrac0 (2705) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:00PM (#10914)

      Because multiplayer.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Doogman on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:42PM

      by Doogman (1299) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:42PM (#10938)

      It's a useful gauge OpenGL support and performance.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:45AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:45AM (#11239) Journal
      Quake 3 has been open sourced for long enough that the code has been cleaned up a lot and runs on pretty much any architecture. It already runs well on we RPi with the binary blob, so it provides a clean baseline for comparison.
      --
      sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 1) by cmn32480 on Wednesday March 05 2014, @02:33PM

      by cmn32480 (443) <cmn32480NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 05 2014, @02:33PM (#11336) Journal

      Thanks for the insight and the frankly kind and informative answers to a question that might have been modded into oblivion at a former hangout of ours.

      --
      "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jcd on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:07PM

    by jcd (883) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:07PM (#10825)

    Difficulty and potential for 'rushed-out-the-door' scenarios aside, we need more and more of this in the FOSS world. Financial incentives are powerful. Even the most well-meaning, FOSS-philosophy-believing, technical-know-how-having people need money to survive.

    --
    "What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Katastic on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:17PM

      by Katastic (3340) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:17PM (#10969)

      If more people put their money where their mouths are, we'd have a ton of progress in areas that are lacking.

      People are willing to spend thousands on televisions, guitar equipment, and plenty of hobbies. But when it comes to software, everyone thinks it should be free.

      Specialize in what you're good at and outsource the rest. Otherwise, you're just wasting time.

  • (Score: 2) by hatta on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:16PM

    by hatta (879) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:16PM (#10833)

    What phones are based on the BCM21553?

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by citizenr on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:26PM

    by citizenr (2737) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:26PM (#10836)

    VideoCore IV is dead commercially. Broadcom blew it in the mobile market, even startups like Vivante overtook them shipping stuff in Chinese fly by night units (Actions, Rockchip) and brand names (Freescale). Broadcom is currently not shipping anything with VideoCore IV.

    Releasing code is a really nice gesture by them, but its 2 years too late. Imagine shipping Rasppi with this documentation.

    • (Score: 3) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:34PM

      by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:34PM (#10843) Journal

      Imagine shipping Rasppi with this documentation.

      Yeah, then instead of being the only thing besides bitcoin I ever saw on /. for months, RaspPi could have... been the only thing besides bitcoin I ever saw on /. for months.

      I have no idea what actual sales numbers were, or how much better you think an open graphics driver would have made them, but they certainly couldn't have had any more hype than they did.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:49AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:49AM (#11241) Journal
        Sales numbers were in the millions at least (if you're really interested, I can ask - half of the RPi Foundation board works one floor up). It's been enough to annoy a lot of people. ARM's software teams were all ready to declare ARMv6 dead and unsupported and then the RPi took off and now they have a few million consumer devices with people actively wanting to run things on them. FreeBSD's ARMv6 port is actually ARMv7-and-RPi - it won't work on a stock ARMv6 core, it has to be at least an ARM1156 (the RPi has an ARM1176). We'd love to be able to require Thumb-2, since it makes significantly (30-50%) smaller binaries, which given the small i-cache sizes of most ARM cores, makes a noticeable difference, but the RPi doesn't support them so we can't. We're likely to end up shipping packages for ARMv7 and separate ones for the RPi.
        --
        sudo mod me up