The bit about Jazelle is particularly weird, given that it's deprecated (though not deprecated enough for Raspi to support its successor) and of fairly niche interest: only to a subset of Java developers (Android doesn't use Jazelle).
Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
11–20 of 68 posts
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#12Rasperry Pi is not using ARM's Mali GPU, but from what I hear ARM is pretty tight about the documentation for that also. I guess for a company that makes its money only from their IP and nothing else, they want to keep it quite protected. I still wish they were more open, though.
It does make me wonder that the two area's which crop up again and again as open source issues are graphics cards and wireless networking cards and I have to ask myself why. Reason being is that why is it these two area's every time, is it a case of violating IP at low levels or that some area's are open source and they have to gain there edge in speacial tweaks they don't wich to open source. I just don't honestly know but nomatter what if it's about closed source drivers under Linux then it always appears to be about some wireless card or more so, some graphics card.
Anybody know a difinative reason why this is the case?
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#13The author does make a very good point about GPIO PIN protection and I'll agree fully with him on that a few extra resistors here and there would of not added that much to the cost and made something a little bit more forgiving, which is a good point for education.
But it does open up a whole new add-on market for kits which in itself can only be good.
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#14For what its worth, I along with some others have reversed engineered the Scalar, Vector and QPU instruction set of the VideoCore processor in the Raspberry Pi.
Some documentation is at https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv
It hasn't been updated in a while as I'm operating under a self imposed embargo - the reason for which will become obvious soon.
Always looking for more input.
(EDIT: There is also a plan to release a beginners guide to reverse engineering).
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#15Urgh, this is not "Unsuitable for Education", it's unsuitable for one pretty narrow (albeit central to the system) educative purpose around System-on-Chip's and GPU's. Kids can still have a fully working linux system hooked up to their tv for $35, which regardless of the OSS status of the hardware is still a win for education in my opinion.
I totally agree.
Actually the point of the Raspberry Pi IS the price because most of the OSS you can install and use in your Raspberry Pi can be installed and used in any regular PC that students may have at home, but can we assume all the students have a computer at home?
My partner works in education and I can tell you that lots of students don't have access to a computer at home. Well, Raspberry Pi price changes everything!
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#16Just like the religious fanatics in the open source software world there seem to be some that want every piece of open source hardware to become some sort of toaster project. The RPi has never even claimed to be OSH, it's just a cheap thing to run OSS on, and there's plenty of educational benefit (in plenty of settings nowhere near schools) to be had from that.
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#17Is there some way I can get back the time I invested in reading that article? I'm honestly not sure why this article has as many up-votes as it does.
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#18All this is pretty much the same as the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Vic-20, C-64, Archimedes and other successful teaching platforms. Sure, third parties disassembled the ROMs, and there were some schematics, but by and large these systems were closed and incompatible with anything else.
Edit: Which is not to say, I don't think more openness would be a wonderful thing. But it's not necessary for it to be a success in schools.
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#19For what its worth, I along with some others have reversed engineered the Scalar, Vector and QPU instruction set of the VideoCore processor in the Raspberry Pi. Some documentation is at https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv It hasn't been updated in a while as I'm operating under a self imposed embargo - the reason for which will become obvious soon. Always looking for more input. (EDIT: There is also a plan…
That bit of information is worthy of a fresh article in itself. Will garner more people who can assist on carrying it on than it might hiding as a comment on a article that clearly has not heard about this great work.
Re: Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education
#20For what its worth, I along with some others have reversed engineered the Scalar, Vector and QPU instruction set of the VideoCore processor in the Raspberry Pi. Some documentation is at https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv It hasn't been updated in a while as I'm operating under a self imposed embargo - the reason for which will become obvious soon. Always looking for more input. (EDIT: There is also a plan…
That bit of information is worthy of a fresh article in itself. Will garner more people who can assist on carrying it on than it might hiding as a comment on a article that clearly has not heard about this great work.
Sure the original idea was that along with a recruitment drive for tools such as LLVM and so forth.
But I'm tied up launching a startup right now...
Definitely want to build a community / set of projects around it.
(EDIT: Let's also be clear there is a game of chess in play - hence the slow disclosure here.
My interpretation from reading various articles is Eben is fairly libertarian, I'd expect him to be pushing to open up everything possible - but Broadcom will be providing the usual big company resistance. So if the pieces are played correctly we will have everything open to the extent it doesn't impact the commercial objectives of Broadcom. In this case I suspect we will at the end of the games-play have open source where it needs to be, and at least have a hook for letting people write custom VideoCore Scalar/Vector and QPU code kernels with suitable documentation. This would be a lovely compromise. I'm sure Eben himself would be all for open sourcing his shader compilation VideoCore stuff (see the topic of his PhD thesis) - as everyone enjoys seeing their work get some recognition), but I dont think Broadcom would allow that :). )