On Sun, 17 Dec 2017 14:39:02 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 16/12/17 09:16, Kiwi User wrote:
>> On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 07:58:02 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> On 15/12/17 22:22, druck wrote:
>>>> On 15/12/2017 11:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>> Need one of these and it occurs  that a PI 3 plus SD card, DVB s2
>>>>> usb dongle, remote mouse and keyboard, case & PSU would actually
>>>>> allow me to drive the HDMI TV port with sound and video,and be happy
>>>>> to access my network media stores via the onboard ethernet.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'd use Ubuntu MATE to underpin it...kaffiene for choice.. looks
>>>>> like kaffiene is in that distro
>>>>
>>>> If you are doing anything with HD video, I'd stick to Raspbian, as
>>>> the video acceleration is better than Ubuntu. (Unless things have
>>>> changed in the last 12 months).
>>>>
>>>> ---druck
>>>>
>>> Thats ood, since Ubuntu is based on Debian...
>>
>> ...but the hardware-specific code used for video acceleration will be
>> in Raspbian-specific drivers. These  may never get back-ported to
>> Debian since they will be quite hardware-specific, i.e. useless on
>> anything not using Broadcom chips that include their GPU
>>
>>
> yebbut ubuntu for the pi  is still based on debian for the pi.

Sure. If I understand the way these things work, for Ubuntu to use Debian
GPU driver it would have to get backported from Raspbian to Debian
possible modified to harmonise its calling conventions and documentation
with the Debian motherlode before being incorporated into Ubuntu.

Given that Ubuntu seems to go off in its own way which isn't necessarily
all that compatible with Debian and/or its direct derivatives it seems
likely that the above harmonisation would need to happen before Ubuntu
could use the Raspbian driver and/or in the meantime Ubuntu has developed
its own drivers for the RPi GPU and either won't use Raspbian code (the
Not Made Here syndrome) or their API is sufficiently different from
Raspbian that they think the extra performance is not worth the effort
needed to make the change.

All of these seems perfectly reasonable reasons for Raspbian and Ubuntu
to be using their own GPU drivers.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie
          | dot org

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