[SOLVED] Hardware Acceleration RPI3

[jpresley23]

Please let me know if this should be posted somewhere else. This may be an X-Y problem, so I'll explain the X first and then discuss the Y.

My project is to see if I could use a Raspberry Pi to replace the locked down windows computer Help Desk stuck our team with to use for our daily stand ups with our off site contractors and employees. Basically with security restrictions and the half assed way our company went with Google Hangouts means that we have to stay logged in to each hangout (we have two for the two separate projects), but we do not have a service user for the computer. So if the person who last logged in to the computer is not around, we have to restart the machine and set up Google Hangouts for the new user.

The basic issue I ran into is that Google Hangouts is only available on ARM devices through Chromium, but the Debian and the Ubuntu repositories do not have a working version of Chromium. The one I compiled from source was unstable and when I got my hands on the last working version in the Ubuntu repositories, video was very laggy with just me and another person i the hangout.

So eventually I used Arch Linux ARM and installed LXQT. So far the system is very snappy and I'm happy with it, but Google Hangouts starts to get laggy over time even if there's only two people logged in, but also gets laggy when about over 3 people are sharing video at a time.

So this is the Y part of the problem. I noticed that there's no hardware acceleration. I am using the xf86-video-fbturbo-git package, but I'd like to confirm whether adding hardware acceleration would solve the lag problem. So that leaves me with a few questions
1. Does it seem likely that enabling hardware acceleration would be helpful?
2. Is it accurate to say that the lack of support of hardware acceleration in the kernel and in the VC4 driver is what causes the lack of hardware acceleration?
3. Would somehow compiling the kernel and/or the VC4 driver to version 4.5+ solve the lack of the hardware acceleration issue.

I'm still a little confused if the VC4 driver is separate from the kernel and how much the directory tree structure for my device is needed when installing the kernel. The last time I compiled kernels and substituted them in my linux distro was right after version 3 came out and I was on Mint, so I'm a little rusty in how to swap kernels.

Even though I can see now that an Odroid C2 or Odroid XU4 would be better for this task, I'd still like to see this through with the RPI3 before bailing to another piece of hardware.

[jpresley23]

One of the reasons I was hopeful was because of this https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/44frge/review_of_kernel_45rc2_on_raspberry_pi_2_my/ but my specific question was not answered.

[loganmc10]

The current kernel (4.4) has full support for the new VC4 driver. That whole business about the 4.5 is just that it will be included in the mainline Linux kernel. Right now the Raspberry Pi uses a "custom" Linux kernel.

You just need to look into enabling it, you start by adding this to /boot/config.txt:

dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d

[jpresley23]

Thanks. Interestingly that seemed to break the boot. Since I'm sure it's an ID-10-T error, I'll mark the thread solved.