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Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

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Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#61

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

Allwinner itself might not be the best example of open source support, but Allwinners products are well supported in the mainline kernel by the outstanding work of the linux sunxi team. See their progress here:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

edit: I now see you link to linux-sunxi, so you probably already know about this.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#62
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…

I know this is still heresy even though we're long past the "RPi is an educational tool for kids!" phase...but you have other choices.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#63
post #46

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…

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…

>and so they cheaped out on $5-10 worth of hardware

The problem is that if you keep not cheaping out on $50-10 worth of hardware, you end up with something that costs $200. Everyone has their own pet peeve with the RPi which could be fixed for an extra $5.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#64
post #5
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…

Yes. Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale's iMX, for starters. Or TI's Sitara line (BeagleBone).

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#65
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SD card failures I'd love someone knowledgeable to explain why this happens. According to general opinion on the RPi forums, it's because SD card manufacturers cheap out all the time. I'd have something like a dozen SD cards running things like cameras over the years, and probably a hundred booting ESXi servers. And I've never seen a failure. Across three RPis, I've bought about seven SD cards, and from everything RP…

> Across three RPis, I've bought about seven SD cards, and from everything RPi users tell me, that's a totally normal failure rate. Sounds about right. I went through maybe 4-6 cards on 2 Raspberry Pis in a year and a half. > I'd love someone knowledgeable to explain why this happens. According to general opinion on the RPi forums, it's because SD card manufacturers cheap out all the time SD cards are basically uniqu…

>it uses the adapter to charge the battery and/or feed the regulator circuit, the key being there is a regulator circuit here. The Pi does not have one.

Wait, what? Of course the RPi has voltage regulators. Do you think the Broadcom chip runs at 5V? There's a LP2980-N and NCP1117 shown in the schematic.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#66
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.

Broadcom has no interesting in selling parts to anyone unless you're moving millions of handsets a year.

Other manufacturers use cheap dev boards as a way to seed sales with manufacturers (e.g. Pandaboard or Beaglebone), but RPi was not one of them.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#67
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…

What SoC of that class (perf/price) was on shelves when the rpi started ?

OMAP3, OMAP4, Sitara, iMX5, iMX6.

The Broadcom part in the RPi was heavily subsidized. Don't be fooled by price here.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#68
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The OPi chip maybe for not cone from a "respected" western company

This isn't some petty nationalist agenda like you're claiming. AllWinner's lack of respect stems from their pathological refusal to cooperate with the Linux kernel and their many GPL license violations. They throw out new hardware cores very frequently, but the hardware is impossible to keep updated (and is thus insecure and hard to use) because AllWinner won't release hardware documentation or source code. I've got a few AllWinner devices, and they're poorly suited as general-purpose computing devices if you need both graphics and a recent kernel. They collect dust with my other nigh-unusable hardware.

Most of the AllWinner support in the kernel has been added despite the company's deplorable position, and the major community repository of information is highly critical of them (http://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner). It's sad for a company when your major users and developers think so poorly of you.

Broadcom also acted like this for many years, and was similarly hated. The Raspberry Pi has been a bit of a paradigm shift in corporate policy which has earned them a lot more respect. And it's still been a rather slow journey.

If AllWinner wants respect, they can earn it by making their hardware easy to use for the hobbyist and non-commercial developers they're courting with all the cheap knockoffs they're releasing (e.g. Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc which try and profit off brand name similarity). Blaming it on Western propaganda is just pitiful self-deception.

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#69
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

> abomination

You know, this kind of language doesn't make people want to spend money and effort on open sourcing things. Where's your cheap open hardware, then?

Re: Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi

#70
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yet they have the best mainline driver support, with a fully open VPU driver.

It is not fully open. (http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX). Partial code was published a year and a half ago, but the video engine still isn't supported. Their GPUs are Mali, as well, which is still a large obstacle in running a modern kernel.

Not to mention that all the code they published was as code dumps, some was under unclear licensing, and it's never on a remotely modern kernel, so it requires heavy porting. But yeah, they did release the code after years of complaints about GPL violations.

Giving a company credit for community efforts is kind of misleading.

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