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A birthday present from Broadcom

raspberrypi.org

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Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#71

Post by polshaw »

simcop2387 wrote: post #38
MrZongle2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is another example of how Raspberry Pi Foundation's decision not to move forward with a gazillion different boards, but rather to stick with A and B and let the software evolve, was a good one. I'm very excited to see what the next year brings.

Yea with this happening I think what I would love is a bit more cpu power on the pi. Not even the new 64bit arm cores or anything but an A-15 or A-9 at double the MHz of the existing PI would put it in a huge sweetspot for embedded performance and make it far more usable for a desktop (with ideally more ram too but that's always good).

To be fair, the Pi opened the floodgates in terms of ARM boards; there are now loads of them.. not $25 but nothing like the insane pre-pi prices. The beaglebone black from TI is a good step up: 1Ghz A8 (~2x rPi performance), 1GB ram, $45. They don't really need to segment themselves (yet), as others can fill in the gaps.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#72

Post by jxf »

petermonsson wrote: post #69
jxf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, that's not what "open source" means. Reading the license agreement is always required to determine if that's actually okay to do. In this case it's okay as long as you reproduce the license in any redistributions (e.g. hosting it on GitHub).

The original article states that the code is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license. The 3-clause BSD license permits redistribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

That's pretty much what I just said. "In this case it's okay as long as you reproduce the license in any redistributions (e.g. hosting it on GitHub)."

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#73

Post by akiselev »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #62
akiselev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost a universal problem with firmware and chip engineers, who are generally older and more experienced, and thus apparently can't be taught new tricks. There are also issues with bureaucracies in each and every semiconductor company (which are on average decades old) so firmware is usually hot potatoed around by management and ends up lighting the customers' projects on fire almost every damn time. I don't…

They also have to live in fear of patent suits. Open-sourcing a modern chipset driver is a pretty ballsy thing to do.

IANAL and I don't have much experience with the legal side of silicon IP but from some cursory conversations with people in the industry, if you're making a chip as advanced as a VideoCore, you're certainly already cross licensing a lot of IP cores. If you license, for example, a EHCI compliant USB core or an MMU or cache pipeline that you get in the form of a VHDL or Verilog file (poor you), that license automatically transfers a right to the patents (as long as the legal chain of contracts were worked on by competent negotiators and lawyers) and rarely do those extend to firmware source code from my understanding.

There could still be problems with the documentation of the interfaces to different cores or whatever, but that's peanuts to a company like Broadcom. I'd guess they already have very liberal agreements for important IP and the stuff you'd sue over is mostly the closed source silicon.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#74

Post by akiselev »

gtlk wrote: post #67
ansimionescu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good ol' gzip download, because fuck source control. edit: FWIW, a friend who works there told me flat-out to just avoid them (I'm job-hunting)

Don't worry, they're going to have to release it again. This zip contains many files with copyright (c) Broadcom (and other companies) missing the 3-clause BSD license. On an unrelated note, x86 looks like RISC compared to this chip assembly language :) vmul -,H(1,0),3 CLRA ACC vadd HX(3,0),H(0,0),2 ACC vasr H(0++,0),HX(2++,0),2 REP 2 ;vmov H(0++,0),0 REP 2 vst H(0++,0),(r0+=r3) REP 2 add r0,16 addcmpblt r5,1,r1,loop…

Looks like SSE2 or SSE3 with a different syntax and vector support.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#76

Post by [deleted] »

jxf wrote: post #65
petermonsson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is open source. You can put it on Github if you want to.

Generally speaking, that's not what "open source" means. Reading the license agreement is always required to determine if that's actually okay to do. In this case it's okay as long as you reproduce the license in any redistributions (e.g. hosting it on GitHub).

[deleted]

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#77

Post by dublinben »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #19
ebenupton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite yet. We're hoping to be able to provide a minimum-functionality blobless world fairly soon.

I think this is another example of how Raspberry Pi Foundation's decision not to move forward with a gazillion different boards, but rather to stick with A and B and let the software evolve, was a good one. I'm very excited to see what the next year brings.

Different development boards (like the Beaglebone Black) are already more open, but get much less attention. The Raspberry Pi has an enormous amount of mindshare, but they've been doing a pretty poor job until now of shifting the status quo of this industry.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#79

Post by Danieru »

jxf wrote: post #65
petermonsson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is open source. You can put it on Github if you want to.

Generally speaking, that's not what "open source" means. Reading the license agreement is always required to determine if that's actually okay to do. In this case it's okay as long as you reproduce the license in any redistributions (e.g. hosting it on GitHub).

There appears to be a common confusion that Open Source means "source you can see". Instead Open Source is a made-up word which was created to avoid the confusion associated with Free Software, as in the Free Software Foundation.

That is to say: an "open source" license which does not let you redistribute is not an Open Source license at all. Even Microsoft has not tried to mis-use the term instead using "Share Source" for their, thing.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#80

Post by blacksmith_tb »

caycep wrote: post #78

Quick noob question...is the Pi still the best/most flexible option for general hardware hacking? What about ARM dev boards from Samsung, Qualcomm etc?

'Best' can measured in a few ways, the RPi has a huge community, and it's certainly a bargain (though you will end up buying a bunch of odds and ends to get going). The Beaglebone Black is probably the other major contender, way more GPIO pins, can boot from the onboard memory, is ARMv7, for $10 more.
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