VCHIQ(4) Device Drivers Manual VCHIQ(4)

vchiq —
Broadcom VideoCore Host Interface device driver

vchiq* at simplebus?

The vchiq driver provides support for the VideoCore 4 GPU messaging interface in Broadcom SoCs found in boards such as the Raspberry Pi.

Libraries in pkgsrc provide OpenGL ES support and video decoding acceleration for the VideoCore 4 using the /dev/vchiq interface exposed to userland.

Audio output support is provided by the kernel through vcaudio(4), which uses this messaging interface to the GPU internally.

bcmgpio(4), vcaudio(4), pkgsrc/misc/raspberrypi-userland, pkgsrc/multimedia/omxplayer

The vchiq device driver appeared in NetBSD 7.0.

/dev/vchiq does not follow the standard model for graphical acceleration on Unix-like systems, so applications have to be specially built to take advantage of it. The interface to userland also cannot be exposed by 64-bit or big endian kernels due to problems in the upstream Broadcom code.
February 26, 2021 NetBSD 9.99