Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

Sadists.

The Pi's choice of picking one of the most egregiously unsupported and anti-open source CPU cores was absurd. The people doing the absurdly hard work of taking up the slack that the Raspberry Pi Foundation created from this pick AND the RPI Foundations complete unconcern about the situation and open source at large is to me beyond belief. For a thing that purported to be an educational platform, this situation ought never have happened. At the time at least the low price of the decrepit old core was a good useful competitive advantage, I can acknowledge that, but it remains revolting to me that the #1 cheap Linux system is the spawn of some ancient horror Broadcom dropped with ghastly documentation and unsupportable drivers.

But congratulations. For some reason people have kept the march of progress going on this beast. The RPI3 is rated for 24GFLOPS which is 1 more than a PS3 cell processor. It's been an unbelievable amount of work to get anywhere near unlocking the unique video core to get anywhere near there, but people keep pushing, so good on them. I still think it's a mistake for volunteers to work so ridiculously hard to build drivers for a core whose maker has contributed so little, spent so long releasing even basic docs, and who implemented so many really weird abnormal subsystems, especially when it was originally atop such an ancient core.

But I am sincerely impressed and it has been amazing work slowly wrangling this abomination into order.

As a little cherry on top, the CPU they sourced is also crippled with no onchip crypto. Even the half-price Pine64 has a CPU with crypto instruction sets.

At first I was optimistic that with all the popularity of the RPi, someone would eventually be a hero, but the fact that apparently not a single leak of the full datasheet has occurred after all these years also tells a lot about how Broadcom operates. Even the usual neighbourly Chinese forums are noticeably devoid of Broadcom information --- not as in "taken down/DMCA'd", but as in "we just don't know anyone who has access and is willing to share".

Then again, forgive me for generalising, but the RPi community has always appeared to me to be comprised of mostly "new school" "hackers and makers", with very few from the "old school" "hack-and-free" culture. They haven't had to deal with the anti-open-source attitude of Broadcom and the unavailability of drivers. They aren't the type who think things like electrical specifications for GPIOs are important (the last time I checked, they were officially unavailable... and anyone asking on the forums was responded to condescendingly or misleadingly by the officials.) They just don't know any better. It's not surprising then, that a large part of the community is actually praising BRCM for making the RPi possible.

> Sadists.

You meant masochists?

No, Broadcom is quite unique in requiring blobs to boot. There are plenty of SoCs that are functional without firmware blobs.

Generally there are issues getting the GPU working well without firmware blobs but other aspects work fine.

Check out the Freescale part used in Bunnie's Novena laptop for example.

This is also the case for TI parts and the other manufacturers you list. Broadcom is somewhat unique in requiring a blob to even boot the system.