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Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

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Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#31

Post by superflyguy »

milesf wrote: post #19

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?

There is no sane reason which would explain why you should not have bought a Pi. Open or not it would not make any difference to more than a small room full of people. A bunch of people spent years designing hardware and negotiating with people to get the Pi built at a low cost and it's become the best selling UK computer ever with over 10,000,000 sales. It's succeeded at what it was supposed to do; provide an educational platform for kids.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#32

Post by mongol »

Itsdijital wrote: post #24
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 founder and CEO of RPi was a technical director and ASIC architect at Broadcom. Looking at it like that, its dead obvious why they went with broadcom.

Indeed.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#33

Post by faragon »

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 "24 GFLOPS" in RP come from the GPU (Videocore IV, 32-bit precision) [1].

The PS3 does more than 230 GFLOPS, just with the Cell processor (1 dual threaded CPU and 7 vector units -CPUs with wide SIMD, working in 256KB local scratchpad RAM-) [2]. In addition to that, the PS3 GPU does 400 GFLOPS [3]. So the PS3 is "600 GFLOPS" (32-bit precision).

[1] https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/wiki/VideoCor...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specif...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_'Reality_Synthesizer'#cite...

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#34

Post by bostand »

makomk wrote: post #28
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…

The Orange Pi PC is $15, roughly comparable to the Pi 3 performance wise, and doesn't require any of this hilarity to boot with open source code.

Not sure why this is downvoted.

The OPi chip maybe for not cone from a "respected" western company but it is in all regards a more open chip.

While the datasheet is almost as thin as that of Broadcom it is mostly because they use standard components where the full datasheet is available from arm.

There are also far less magic blobs and crazy boot gymnastics in there.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#35

Post by trome »

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…

You are fighting the good fight, freeing one of the most common single board computers! That being said, besides quantity, why focus on the Raspberry Pi instead of Allwinner H3 based boards or another board where most of the support (including uboot) is already upstreamed & can be run with a fully libre stack?

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#36

Post by trome »

makomk wrote: post #28
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…

The Orange Pi PC is $15, roughly comparable to the Pi 3 performance wise, and doesn't require any of this hilarity to boot with open source code.

The OrangePi Zero is $7, same H3 SOC with the same software stack, plus it has ethernet, wifi & POE.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#37

Post by trome »

rincebrain wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yet they have the best mainline driver support, with a fully open VPU driver. Not saying they did any of that mind you, but they at least put the docs out there and eventually posted their BSP on github under GPLv2, so their changes could be updated & mainlined.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#38

Post by sambe »

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…

Educational and 100% free are not the same. It's not remotely hard to imagine them having other trade-offs to make and being most concerned with getting devices in hands.

"Abomination" is ridiculous.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#39

Post by bostand »

superflyguy wrote: post #31
milesf wrote: post #19

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?

There is no sane reason which would explain why you should not have bought a Pi. Open or not it would not make any difference to more than a small room full of people. A bunch of people spent years designing hardware and negotiating with people to get the Pi built at a low cost and it's become the best selling UK computer ever with over 10,000,000 sales. It's succeeded at what it was supposed to do; provide an educat…

Counterpoint: The pi runs Linux inefficiently, draws too much power and gets too hot. All of these could probably have been fixed with minimal support from broadcom (and a bit more open thinking from them during the design).

Open source is not a crazy idea by a bunch of fanatics, it had real world implications.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#40

Post by trome »

oneplane wrote: post #7
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…

You make it sound like there was an alternative, which at least at design-time, there wasn't. On top of that, other vendors have pretty much the same problems. Take Intel's stuff for example. It doesn't work without a BSP and you can't even boot a system and have it on for over 30 minutes without a running Management Engine. Qualcomm, AllWinner, Marvell, Ti, they all make ARM SoC's and they all need their own BSP's t…

Sure, but Allwinner did release their BSP under GPLv2, which the community summarily ported to mainline for the chunks they hadn't rewritten already.

Broadcom has yet to do anything like that.

https://github.com/allwinner-zh/linux-3.4-sunxi

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