Broadcom Videocore IV (Raspberry Pi) support

[ZILtoid1991]

I'm thinking on implementing a GPU support into my 2D game engine (currently relies on SSE2 for graphics), and since using most preexisting libraries would be a bit clunky for 2D (most modern 2D games use polygons as sprites, and I don't want to deal with the Z axis), I was thinking on making my own implementation. I'm planning to use DCompute to implement this, and probably add functions that would make it useful as a library.

While the Videocore IV GPU doesn't have any OpenCL implementation, it's very well documented (https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv). I probably could help in a few weeks, I currently have other things to do.

[thewilsonator]

I'm glad you're interested, however: as you say Videocore IV lacks an OpenCL implementation, but more critically it lacks an LLVM backend which is the way we target OpenCL and CUDA.

[thewilsonator]

@ZILtoid1991 are you still interested in this?

[ZILtoid1991]

Yes, I am. Only I have to struggle with other projects (mostly art related) and finding some reliable source of income. The latter is vital as many of my computer stuff is barely working, I'm currently struggling to get an image on my monitor which has capacitor failure, and I can't really find a way to disassemble it due to its non-repairable snap design. The former might end up as a way of income, because many local companies don't want to hire people who don't have 3-5 year of experience, outsourcing those entry level jobs to poor countries is pretty much their way to go instead of waiting until rookies catch up with the technologies used by the development companies in my country. My financial status even ruined many family connections, and possibly ends in I'm dropping out from college.

Personal issues aside, I even can offer a helping hand, but keep in mind that I not only have to find some replacement hardware, but also pay for my college too. Even if I manage to find a job quickly, the first time I'll be able to buy the hardware needed to test the codes, the first time I could buy it would be around November. Otherwise it would be a good idea (in my opinion) that to first start only with the VPU/pixel pipeline, that would make it possible to implement the blitter and the alpha-blending parts of my planned library, bitmap rotation, scaling, etc. will probably done by the QPU.

[Zenitur]

Raspberry Pi 3 is now have OpenCL.

How to install OpenCL on Raspberry Pi
Not supported functions
clinfo output on Pastebin

[ZILtoid1991]

https://github.com/christinaa/LLVM-VideoCore4

There's also an LLVM now, but its two years old now. With this, a more direct and bare-metal approach is possible, however I'm not experienced with compiler development to upport this to the more recent LLVM versions.

[thewilsonator]

The OpenCL implementation seems to support SPIR, which means that you can generate SPIR-V from LDC, run that through a SPIR-V -> SPIR translator. I don't think I support using non-SPIR-V binaries in dcompute yet but shouldn't be too hard.

[Zenitur]

doe300/VC4C#32 As I know, VC4CL isn't depends of SPIR-V anymore.