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Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

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Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#11

Post by waterhouse23 »

rektide wrote: post #2

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 situati…

The reason they chose this Broadcom part is because they could get it cheap from Broadcom (founders have an association with Broadcom).

So, basically it was a political choice to use this part. I think it also helped Broadcom sell a part which wasn't hugely popular.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#12

Post by rincebrain »

userbinator wrote: post #9
rtpg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there SoCs at a comparable price/speed that are more open? I can understand being disappointed at this choice, but if no other options exist, then either you're sacrificing price or performance to get more open-ness. My impression has been that this has mostly been about giving a cheap, easy to use software platform, and they've succeeded at that because of the price/performance balance. That was then, though. No…

AllWinner comes to mind; here's one of the more well-known RPi-ish boards using them: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardwa...

Allwinner's been known to play hard and fast with the GPL and LGPL, so I'm not sure I'd cite them for being better about open source.

cf. http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#13

Post by aceperry »

rtpg wrote: post #5
rektide wrote: post #2

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 situati…

Are there SoCs at a comparable price/speed that are more open? I can understand being disappointed at this choice, but if no other options exist, then either you're sacrificing price or performance to get more open-ness. My impression has been that this has mostly been about giving a cheap, easy to use software platform, and they've succeeded at that because of the price/performance balance. That was then, though. No…

"My impression has been that this has mostly been about giving a cheap, easy to use software platform, and they've succeeded at that because of the price/performance balance."

It was chosen mainly for the low price. The performance was a little subpar but it had the advantage of a decent video graphics block.

"Now that this platform is more established, I imagine they can apply some pressure to get things like the video core to be more open"

Broadcom was one of the worst companies to get documentation from, even for their own customers. Unless you were a big customer, you're lucky to get the time of day from them. Hopefully, their new owners Avago will have a different attitude towards the open source community.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#14

Post by stevekemp »

viraptor wrote: post #8
rektide wrote: post #2

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 situati…

> Sadists. You meant masochists?

I think the implication was that the choice made users suffer, and feel pain - so sadism fits.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#15

Post by BuuQu9hu »

christina_b wrote: post #3
rektide wrote: post #2

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 situati…

>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 ones, so the toolchain we have is pretty close to what Broadcom would have with their MetaWare compiler for VC4. >The RPI3 is rated for 24GFLOPS You mean the VPU, we also have QPU and ARM on the side. >so many really weird abnormal subsystem…

Which toolchain are you using? binutils/GCC or LLVM? Is the code for that upstream?

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#16

Post by BuuQu9hu »

userbinator wrote: post #6
rektide wrote: post #2

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 situati…

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…

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-birthday-present-from-bro...

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#18

Post by christina_b »

BuuQu9hu wrote: post #15
christina_b wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ones, so the toolchain we have is pretty close to what Broadcom would have with their MetaWare compiler for VC4. >The RPI3 is rated for 24GFLOPS You mean the VPU, we also have QPU and ARM on the side. >so many really weird abnormal subsystem…

Which toolchain are you using? binutils/GCC or LLVM? Is the code for that upstream?

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

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#19

Post by milesf »

I confess. I'm completely ignorant about the Raspberry Pi even though I have a 3rd generation I bought recently. So I don't really understand what the significance of "Blobless Linux" is.

Is the Raspberry Pi an open-source software and hardware platform? If not, what is? What should I have bought if not the Pi3?

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#20

Post by christina_b »

BuuQu9hu wrote: post #17

It would be nice to add RPi support to the u-boot bootloader.

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 things easier. Besides, the firmware will later run an RTOS (for example LittleKernel) and Uboot doesn't provide RTOS-like services.
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