How powerful is the Librem 5, and how could I make games for it?

Hardware Librem 5
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Very late to the party and I’m digging up an old thread, so my apologies in advance. It’s difficult to compare one processor to another. How well your software is optimized for the processor is far now important.

Many here, I assume, are current desktop/laptop Linux users. The Linux kernel is an amazing piece of software. Current kernels can boot from a freaking USB stick on a 15 year old machine and provide a usable (let’s call it some light web browsing) experience. Here’s looking at you LXDE/LXQt.
Sure, some are discouraged by the choice of hardware. I’m not. C is an incredibly fast language and the Linux kernel does an excellent job exploiting that speed.

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Did you start with your next project? I want to do something for the Librem 5 in Godot, but I just a “newbie” on this.

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I have played around with Godot, but I haven’t figured if there is build support yet.

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Has someone tested if the devkit has vulkan support? In case not (as I read somewhere that the current driver is the problem), how easy would it be for someone to install a propietary driver for that?

Would we only add a non-free to the sources of apt or install a deb or would it be even more fiddling?

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Ah seeing OpenTTD running on the DevKit is really cool, I love that old-school game!

The Librem 5 should run a lot of games. I had the FOSS RTS game 0 A.D. running on a Raspberry Pi 1B some years ago (only for a proof of concept, it wasn’t stable due to low RAM). I know we maintained unofficial support for ARM, and looks like we’re still packaged for Debian ARM. The codebase might need some OpenGL ES fixes and elsewhere, I doubt that’s tested very often, but I do notice some recent posts on the forums.

I’m curious how the devkit handles a GPU and RAM-intensive game like that. Anyhow when I get this phone and if nobody else has done so, I will at least get 0 A.D. working (might even consider UI alterations and optimizations).

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0 ad has only armhf as architecture, wouldn’t you need arm64?

I just saw that freeciv would probably also work (at least in a convergence mode) as there are packages for everything https://packages.debian.org/sid/freeciv

I think looking for packages is a good idea :smiley:

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0 A.D. mostly supports arm64 / aarch64, but first we need to upgrade SpiderMonkey (the game’s JavaScript engine) or someone could make a patch to fix the SM arm64 build in the meantime, since upgrades are very tedious.

If that’s the only problem, it’s not a major obstacle.

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According to the documentation, the i.MX 8M supports Vulkan and OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1, but the Etnaviv driver only supports OpenGL ES 2.0, so you will have to use the proprietary Linux driver for the i.MX 8M if you want Vulkan. However, I don’t have a Dev Kit to try this.

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I agree, the big quesion would be - how would I install this propietary driver and is it compatible with the librem 5

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You should be able to install the proprietary Vivante GPU driver on the Librem 5. Boundary Devices’s Nitrogen8M board with an i.MX 8M Quad uses the Vivante GPU driver with a Linux/Wayland+Weston/GNOME stack, which is basically what the Librem 5 will be using.

However, building a game based on Vulkan will severely limit your audience, because I doubt very many people will want to play it on the Librem 5 if they have to install the proprietary Vivante driver. You can do a lot with OpenGL ES 2.0 in terms of gaming. Also, the Allwinner A64 in the PinePhone only supports OpenGL ES 2.0, and I expect that a lot more PinePhones will be sold than Librem 5’s.

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