egl_rpi on Raspberry Pi 4

[David Bronke]

I've been unsuccessfully trying to get my app to render directly to the framebuffer on the Raspberry Pi 4. (it worked fine on the 3B+) So far, all the indications I've been able to find about people using Kivy on the Raspberry Pi 4 seem to point to X11 now being required. In the past, you could directly render to the framebuffer without needing X11 installed, using KIVY_WINDOW=egl_rpi. Is this no longer working due to the upgrade from the Videocore IV to the Videocore VI in the RPi 4?

Is there something I can do to help restore this functionality on the Raspberry Pi 4? I'd love to dive in with a PR, but I'm not sure where to start, exactly. The error I'm seeing is:

egl_rpi - ImportError: cannot import name 'bcm' from 'kivy.lib.vidcore_lite' (/home/karvy/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/kivy/lib/vidcore_lite/__init__.py)

[Pieter van der Meer]

I'm afraid this is how it is at the moment. The guys at raspberry have a fake KMS driver that runs on top of X11. This allows you to run kivy full screen, but you still need to boot lightdm / X11 first. Not ideal. There might be plans to do a true full screen KMS driver, but it's not high on the priority list of the Pi team. The root cause of all of this is that they don't want to / or can't use some lib that works directly on the videocore anymore. You can follow threads about this on the Raspberry Pi forum..

Cheers,

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Kivy users support" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to kivy-users+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/kivy-users/ed09c183-59ce-4b31-977f-b1fbcce8f6e7%40googlegroups.com.

--

Pieter van der Meer
System engineer / Owner
Tasty Chips Electronics
www.tastychips.nl