Pi4 as Desktop computer

[interestedindividual]

Any explanation on kde plasma with opengl compositor? Is that working? How? Thanks!

[clicky]

I had to switch compositor off for KDE to display any content (text and images). With compositor on - it would render background image and shadows all around but nothing else

[interestedindividual]

Xrender works pretty smoothly but I guess having no effects is a good option too.

[Sentinel]

plasma-discover is messed up.
Constantly checking for updates in endless loop.
Has someone fixed it yet?

[jamesh]

plasma-discover is messed up.
Constantly checking for updates in endless loop.
Has someone fixed it yet?

That's nothing to do with us, so we won't be looking at it.

[interestedindividual]

plasma-discover is messed up.
Constantly checking for updates in endless loop.
Has someone fixed it yet?

That's nothing to do with us, so we won't be looking at it.

Actually it is to do with you... packagekit is broken and it affects your add / remove software app too. This is reported in different ways in several places on the forum. People can still use apt-get but any packagekit based apps can't see the internet.

[Heater]

What is "packagekit" ?

Having been a happy Linux user since 1996 and been through a pile of distros before settling on Debian I have never heard of packagekit.

[5t4n5]

Ah, we have spent lots of time optimising Chromium, haven't touched Firefox.

Is Firefox going to be optimised? It's very clunky and youtube playback sucks.

[hansotten]

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/

[Heater]

Just what the world needs. Yet another package manager.

Anyway, PackageKit is not the package manager of the Debian operating system (used in Raspbian) so it's hardly up to the Pi Foundation to fix it if it's broken.

[interestedindividual]

Just what the world needs. Yet another package manager.

Anyway, PackageKit is not the package manager of the Debian operating system (used in Raspbian) so it's hardly up to the Pi Foundation to fix it if it's broken.

It is used by their default package gui... they do want it to work for newbies!

[jamesh]

Ah, we have spent lots of time optimising Chromium, haven't touched Firefox.

Is Firefox going to be optimised? It's very clunky and youtube playback sucks.

Not by us.

[jamesh]

plasma-discover is messed up.
Constantly checking for updates in endless loop.
Has someone fixed it yet?

That's nothing to do with us, so we won't be looking at it.

Actually it is to do with you... packagekit is broken and it affects your add / remove software app too. This is reported in different ways in several places on the forum. People can still use apt-get but any packagekit based apps can't see the internet.

As far as we know there is no problem with packagekit*. It worked last week, and there have been no changes. It could be a temporary downstream repo issue?

* packagekit is used as the middleware between apt (or other backends) and higher level application that need to use package manager services.

[PeterO]

Not related to this is it ?
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... 1&t=245022
PeterO

[jcyr]

Ah, we have spent lots of time optimising Chromium, haven't touched Firefox.

Is Firefox going to be optimised? It's very clunky and youtube playback sucks.

Not by us.

That's unfortunate. I avoid all things Google! Looking forward to a Ubuntu port.

[jamesh]

Is Firefox going to be optimised? It's very clunky and youtube playback sucks.

Not by us.

That's unfortunate. I avoid all things Google! Looking forward to a Ubuntu port.

Firefox are surely the best people to be sorting out HW acceleration, depending on how they do their codec handling, it should be fairly easy to leverage the Chromium changes (if you are a Firefox expert - we don't have one of those, or the time). Problem is that the devs of these browsers seem to ignore the fact that low power systems exist, and they have plenty of CPU and memory bandwidth to blast data around, which means the data paths for video can be quite inefficient.This is where all the Chromium work was aimed.

Note also that Chromium is not Chrome - it has all the Google data specific stuff removed. Not so spi-y.

[Musketeer]

I am too not fan of closed source products, but I do hope developers did their best to bring acceleration of video ASAP...

[6by9]

Firefox are surely the best people to be sorting out HW acceleration, depending on how they do their codec handling, it should be fairly easy to leverage the Chromium changes (if you are a Firefox expert - we don't have one of those, or the time). Problem is that the devs of these browsers seem to ignore the fact that low power systems exist, and they have plenty of CPU and memory bandwidth to blast data around, which means the data paths for video can be quite inefficient.This is where all the Chromium work was aimed.

To give context:
- the base system is for a codec somewhere to deliver the raw YUV data as a buffer. The CPU then takes on the task of converting that to RGBA, resizing to fit the window, and blit it into the framebuffer. Performance for this sucks! It's even worse than it sounds as Chromium's sandboxing would often require the buffer to be copied along the way.

- the changes that we had implemented for Pi2 and 3 was to offload the resize and format conversion onto the hardware (which can do it very efficiently), leaving the CPU to blit (mempcy) it into the framebuffer. For fullscreen 1080p this is still quite a performance hit. It also passed a custom handle down parts of the pipeline, therefore avoiding some of the otherwise needless copies.

- the latest changes switch to using GL for the composition. In theory the codec can deliver the YUV frames into a memory buffer as YUV, the memory buffer can be exported to what is known as a dmabuf (sometimes DRM_PRIME), and that handle gets passed down the pipeline. The 3D system can then import the handle and render it nearly directly into the desktop scene.

At present the codec side is still done via MMAL, but that's mainly because Chromium's support for the V4L2 codec API is hidden/broken for X11 (It requires an abstraction layer called Ozone, and that blows up badly under X. They seem to mainly use it with ChromeOS).
V4L2 would be the obvious API to do all this cleanly and in a platform independent manner. Both ffmpeg and GStreamer implement it, although FFmpeg currently doesn't support exporting the dmabuf handle (the LibreELEC folk are looking at that at the moment). Firefox could take advantage of one of those helper libraries, or it can wrap the V4L2 stuff for itself. It's a case of whatever their developers think is worth the effort.

[Musketeer]

Are you suggesting that we get accelerated FF someday?

[bleep42]

Here is one!
Details can be found here:- https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... 1&t=244515

Paspberry Pi4 Desktop

PiCrustss.jpg (100.64 KiB) Viewed 1506 times

Paspberry Pi4 Desktop connectors

PiCrustRears.jpg (92.7 KiB) Viewed 1506 times

[jamesh]

Are you suggesting that we get accelerated FF someday?

If the Firefox devs can be bothered.

[Musketeer]

You pointed out that they still think only in big desktopy way, so it doesn't look that way...

[jamesh]

You pointed out that they still think only in big desktopy way, so it doesn't look that way...

Well, it's all open source, anyone can go in and do it. I'm sure we or the FF devs would take a PR.

[Musketeer]

Cant believe the news!

[pagenotfound]

Cant believe the news!

That's actually a good thing because you shouldn't believe the "news". As has been said, it's only going to happen when the Firefox people can be bothered to do it. Currently FF hardware acceleration is being slowly introduced for certain NVIDIA and Intel chipsets. The Pi is not even supported by Mozilla.

The only reason we have FF at all is because the Debian folks compile it. In recent times Debian has been lagging behind official FF releases so much that there were no security fixes for the Raspian version available any more. Apparently because Debian had to figure out how to deal with the Rust toolchain that is required for compiling FF now.

A rather sad situation because the Pi ecosystem is now involuntarily contributing to the Internet browser monoculture that is Chrome/Chromium. Not to mention that Mozilla is still more interested in privacy issues and so on..