> Aside from being exciting to FOSS enthusiasts for philosophical reasons
Freedom is not a philosophical reason.
Open Source ARM userland
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#42> Aside from being exciting to FOSS enthusiasts for philosophical reasons Freedom is not a philosophical reason.
Philosophical doesn't mean arbitrary.
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#43I think everyone who announces that their hardware is "fully open-source" should answer the "Stallman test".
That is, answer the question "Would Stallman use this?".
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#44OK good, now the blob?
This is a pretty dumb request. What are you going to do with a chunk of bits for a processor for which you don't even have a toolchain. There is nothing more to open source other than what is already there. Asking for 'the blob' is akin to asking for the firmware source to a hard disk. Even if you had it you could not do much with it.
You could do a lot with hackable HD firmware. For example recover data from bricked disks or find bugs or make sure that disk you're about to RMA is infact fully wiped, etc etc. That would be especially useful now that SSD's have "turn into brick" failure modes and frequent firmware bugs that trigger them. Other ideas: adding crypto or RAID-friendly knobs, making the filesystem and the on-SSD flash
fs aware of each other and parametrize accordingly, etc etc.
In fact sounds like Apple's latest Fusion Drive is a thing that requires disk firmware and filesystem to cooperate.
The Alphamosaic processor (branded VideoCore in its Broadcom incarnation) has also been marketed as a network and security accelerator in its previous life... It might well be useful for all kinds of stuff.
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#45I think everyone who announces that their hardware is "fully open-source" should answer the "Stallman test". That is, answer the question "Would Stallman use this?".
Instruction set is licensed, fails instantly!
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK everything that runs on the ARM is now open source. The firmware of the GPU itself could still be a blob. That's very cool, I hope NVidia follows suit wishful thinking .
Thanks to Nouveau reverse engineering, you can actually run a number of recentish OpenGL GPUs with a completely open source stack including even the GPU firmware itself. Now, I guess NVidia could put a high-powered processor on their GPUs and move their entire OpenGL driver stack onto it as "firmware" so that they could claim their drivers were open source, but that doesn't seem like something they'd do.
I certainly know about Nouveau. I even contributed to it, albeit indirectly (I'm the guy that wrote decuda). But reverse engineering GPUs is a thankless process, which has to be repeated for every new release of the hardware (in a certain sense, even for every stepping). Of course the tools are better these days so a part of reverse engineering can be done automatically, but still...
And sure, having the userspace and kernel driver open source is only a start. But having everything that runs on the CPU open source is great from a separation-of-concerns perspective.
Open sourcing the firmware and even the hardware itself would be cool, but is a battle for another day... And that'd no more be a matter of the just the GPU, but of all hardware that has firmware, including the CPU, network equipment, 3G radios...
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#47Does it mean that we will soon see many cheap arm based computers built in China? (Similar to android effect)
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the supply is getting better. They have been increasing the production rates and the delivery timings are getting shorter.
Just wanted to mention that the supply from Element 14 in Australia is outstanding. I put in an order for 2x model B's two weeks ago and received them both (512mb model) last thursday ... approx. an 8 day wait.
The supply has gotten really bad again since the switchover to 512MB base RAM has been made public knowledge. You ordered yours just in time.
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! I suppose that's not too surprising; I've yet to hear of anybody open sourcing their core OpenGL implementation (is there even an open implementation other than Mesa?). It would be fun, in a sense, to have raw access to the VideoCore components without any existing firmware. Judging from this comment[0] of yours that I found on a Google search, I'm not the first to think so. Now, as I've said before, if the R…
It's possible to splice into the current blob by using /dev/mem to access the GPU partitioned memory. This lets you hot patch the VideoCore firmware (quite tricky as its running ThreadX OS), or you can hunt down QPU fragments generated by shaders. I have a plan to release an Architecture/Programming guide and will be recruiting more hands shortly for tools like LLVM etc. But today let's celebrate the great work the f…
Just commenting to say thanks for working on this. A barebones open source firmware would be very cool to see.
Re: Open Source ARM userland
#50> Aside from being exciting to FOSS enthusiasts for philosophical reasons Freedom is not a philosophical reason.
Philosophical doesn't mean arbitrary.
"Philosophical" means related to wisdom or knowledge. Philosophy inquires about the nature of things and the boundaries of nature itself.
In that sentence, «philosophical reasons», philosophical meant abstract, remote, detached from practical concerns. The freedoms sought by FLOSS people are very much practical (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ) and with many concrete effects on your daily life. Engineering problems (problems with your video driver? Want to update the OS of your 2-year old tablet?) and social problems (ever heard of somebody whose books have been deleted remotely by a FLOSS app?).