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Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

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Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Broadcom released a tangentially related driver (Not targeted at the RasPi) and the person who could do the quickest, dirtiest port of that driver to kinda-sorta get Quake 3 running got $10k. I remember when this happened, it was a shitshow then, and looking back it makes the people behind the Raspberry Pi Foundation look incompetent if viewed kindly.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#42
post #38
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.

After spending a few days poking around trying to get the I2S block going, abomination is the right word for the processor. If only because of the severe lack of documentation and support.

Your point that the pi board provides educational value despite the frustratingly obtuse abomination at the core is valid though.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#43
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadists. You meant masochists?

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

Makes sense. I read it as referring to people doing the reverse engineering work initially.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#44
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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 it, the BCM283x family of SoCs are just a huge mess and in my opinion are either suited for really specific applications (TV boxes) or as "toys".

The ARM core itself is integrated very poorly almost as an afterthought, since it wasn't in the original design, the BCM283x family is just BCM27xx family VideoCore4 VPU+QPU combinations with an ARM core hacked (and I really do mean hacked) on top.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#45
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.

I think goven the origin story of the Pi, "political" implies something that wasn't there. The Pi was want expected to be the huge success it has been.

They weren't sure they'd sell 1000 initially, and 10,000 was crazy dream. It wasn't conceived as the next wave of hacker and maker computers. Its goal was to be a cheap and accessible way to teach kids programming.

Eben Upton was an SoC architect at Broadcom and was working there full time, and when the Pi was designed they thought they'd shift 1000 units of the end product. Why on Earth would they use anything other than the Broadcom?

It was a practical and logistical choice.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#46
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…

It's really doubtful that more than a tiny fraction of RPi sales have gone to kids. Be honest here, whatever the RPi Foundation's marketing, the overwhelming majority have gone to hobbyists.

The RPi is uniquely unsuited to an educational environment anyway. The SD cards are unreliable, especially in combination with the RPi's poor power filtering and the cheapo phone adapters it's usually paired with. Anyone who has used a RPi has had to deal with filesystem corruption and SD card failures, intermittent USB bus brownouts, etc, and I can only imagine the nightmare of having to maintain a lab with 50 of the things. You can't PXE boot them (let alone remote-manage them) because they have no BIOS, just a blob on a physical card that needs to be swapped out.

The Pi should have had eMMC day one, and shipped with a proper power adapter and better power filtering. But much like their choice of Broadcom SoCs - they made a political decision that they were going to market primarily around the $35 price point, and so they cheaped out on $5-10 worth of hardware and ended up with a device that was entirely unsuitable for their stated purpose.

And the terrible thing is - the PC is not the sole component in the system anyway. The Pi still needs a case, a a monitor, keyboard, switches, etc, and if you are trying to stand up a lab for the first time it's not like you have 50 monitors or keyboards laying around for free, you need to buy those. So you are looking at more like $150 per system anyway, and the $10 you save on cheaping out on the hardware becomes a meaningless fraction of the total cost. Just buy the right hardware the first time. An ECS Liva is only like $75 anyway, it comes with a case, onboard eMMC, AC adapter, and wifi, you've made up the difference in cost in accessories included in the box.

There were many other terrible design decisions as well - such as the choice of USB as a system bus, which is again entirely unsuitable, especially when you are running on a low-power processor where running the USB bus full-tilt eats a significant fraction of your CPU cycles. It's like that shitty Mac Performa x200 road-apple design with the split half-width left-hand/right-hand busses which couldn't talk to each other, it eats up all your cycles by just using your disk or network. Even if the processor on other boards is no faster in synthetic benchmarks - they have a proper system architecture with SATA and often USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet that makes an enormous difference in real-world performance.

http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and-performa-x200-road-a...

Furthermore - the Pi was plagued by driver problems with its USB stack for years. It would randomly drop USB frames when operated at USB 2.0 speeds, and it took upwards of 2 years after launch for the Pi foundation to get around to pushing a fix (again, because they chose a processor for which they could not release documentation, and they did not employ enough staff to actually fix their issues). How on earth are you supposed to do education on it when they can't even get their system bus to be stable?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5249

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/9

You know what I would do if I was running an actual lab? ECS Liva Xs, or other cheapo x86 PCs running a standard stack. Or go down to your university surplus store and pick up as many generic Dell boxes as you need for $50 apiece, out the door, ready to work. The Pi is good for embedded hobbyist work (the i2c interface is very powerful), but it totally fails as a machine for teaching programming compared to Ye Olde White Box.

I tried to run a pair of RPis as my fileservers for about a year and a half, and I finally just gave up and sold them. They aren't good for the "mini Linux PC" application at all, compared to properly-designed hardware that you can buy for only a little bit more money (or sometimes even less money, especially when you work out the total system cost).

(note: Pi3s can finally PXE boot without a SD card, which is like the bare minimum requirement for running an educational PC lab without going insane)

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#47

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

U-boot already does support it: http://elinux.org/RPi_U-Boot I think what is wanted is chainloading u-boot from the blobless firmware.

Oh, thanks for reminding me, I had totally forgotten to care about my u-boot fork for...what? years? It's still on the wiki page, though...

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#48
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of interest, what is your situation where it 'draws too much power and gets too hot'?

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#49
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…

I agree with you. The Pi is wonderful, we have half a dozen running at our company (including handling the phone system), and I've probably given two dozen as gifts to young people who want to get started in programming.

Open shmopen. It's open where it matters. You can take all the code _you_ develop for it and run it easily on other platforms, too.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#50
post #35

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…

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?

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 signed bootloader that exits secure mode before passing control to your code.

My favourite is probably NVIDIA Jetson TX1 where development boards do not have a key fused in them and have documented TrustZone peripherals, so you're free to run your own secure monitor.

Sadly while ARM on rPi does start in secure mode, it lacks any secure peripherals (AxPROT[1] is forced to high so even if ARM is in secure mode, it cannot make secure bus transactions) but it's mostly a matter of principle of being able to have ARM code run in EL3 for me.

The entire point of a development board is to be able to mess around with it, I'm not wasting my time on boards with locked down features.

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