Viewing profile — christina_b

Regular LTO for large sized projects (think Chromium sized), in my experience is by far the biggest bottleneck in the build process. It's partially the reason so much is being inve…

I was pretty sure TouchMe was BetaMonkey's new nick, I don't think it was Ntoskrnl (MalwareTech). From what I've heard TouchMe continued support of his drone's users until he dissa…

BetaMonkey/TouchMe was in fact the person I was referring to who was providing support for his botnet drone builder until he dissapeared with no trace at a later date. Just could n…

I may be totally off base here but IIRC, before he ran MalwareTech and was a whitehat, he participated (and was an op) in fairly "shady" IRC channels, with his oldest nick I can re…

Hm, I may have been wrong, would be nice to have someone who owns one of these boards to verify that: 1). The first stage bootloader doesn't require signing. 2). The first stage bo…

All modern ARM chips support secure mode, it's a set of modes, in AArch64, we colloquially call them EL3 (Exception level 3, highest privilege level above EL2, the hypervisor level…

See my other comment about Allwinner, but basically my biggest issue is that they lock down their bootloader with signing and do not allow you to execute code in EL3/Secure mode wi…

If a "development" board does not let me run my own code in EL3 (Secure monitor mode), I'm not buying it, as simple as that. A lot of boards that use Allwinner chips will use a sig…

>All of these could probably have been fixed with minimal support from broadcom (and a bit more open thinking from them during the design). Support from Broadcom is unlikely to fix…

>drivers handling graphics Actually that's open and mainlined now, there are DRM drivers for BCM285x family but they rely on mailbox interfaces for power and clock management.

Currently it sleeps and waits for a mailbox interrupt after which it acks it and goes back to sleep. We're planning on using the interface to load a second stage firmware that woul…

>No, Broadcom is quite unique in requiring blobs to boot. Yes precisely, so we offer an alternative to those blobs that allows you to boot ARM without needing a closed-source firmw…

We have considered it, however, because there's still a need for a firmware, the first stage bootloader and the firmware itself are using a common driver framework, it just makes t…

binutils/GCC, have Julian to thank for his wonderful toolchain: https://github.com/puppeh/vc4-toolchain

>unlocking the unique video core to get anywhere near there We actually have documented most vector instructions of VC4 and Julian's toolchain supports pretty much all documented o…

Oh, which aspects?

Actually, the bulk SDRAM/ARM work was done by me in the space of around month (though I only ARM to finally work three days ago with Herman's help). You could run Linux on ARM usin…

Yes if you can implement high performance video codecs using pretty much undocumented vector instructions of the VPU, you are welcome to do so.

It wasn't a leak, Broadcom publicly released all this code a while ago to aid the making of an open source GPU driver. All this has been licensed under 3-Clause BSD license and dis…

Yeah, I saw, I haven't looked at it in detail but I think yours probably works better than mine since you did comprehensive testing. My only tests involved compiling my own firmwar…

I outlined what I did in another comment, here's a log from my current firmware: http://crna.cc/vpu_bootlog.txt I think I'm on the right track but I don't have ARM working yet, mos…

VC4 itself doesn't have a MMU per se, it supports very limited memory remap (like PPC BATs) so running a conventional kernel on it is probably not possible. Best bet would be to po…

Don't think I can without first implementing MC emission and running LLVM unit tests on it.

Yeah I looked at it, my firmware mostly just aims at bringing up enough stuff to be able to boot ARM, which is essentially just: - Setting up exception vectors and enabling excepti…