A birthday present from Broadcom • Hacker News Board

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#141

Post by pyre » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 6:22 AM UTC

ozim wrote: post #93

embedded wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, armchair engineer, you sound like you really know what you're talking about. When this old engineer worked on embedded MIPS cores and 802.11[abgn] at Broadcom, everything was under source code control. This was pre-git, so I think we were using cvs. How the hell do you conclude that releasing a zip file means the engineers don't use source code control?

Those kids on HN think that everything cool was invented last summer by some new college grad, funny thing is most of stuff was already invented in 70's but who would care about prehistory of computing.

Yea. I totally remember Web Browsers, Big Data, and Terabyte hard drives back in the 70's. It's too bad that these things were lost to the ages, only to be re-invented in the present.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#142

Post by jevinskie » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 6:25 AM UTC

peterderivaz wrote: post #86

gtlk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The vector register file is a block of registers 64 bytes across by 64 down which can be accessed horizontally (H) or vertically (V), and in units of 16 bytes (H8), 16 shorts (H16 or HX), or 16 32-bit words (H32). Each processor has an accumulator that can be cleared (CLRA) or used (ACC). This code is basically equivalent to the following C code: uint8 in[2][16]; int16 temp[2][16]; int32 r1,r3,r5; uint8 *r0; do { ...…

Wow, a selectable row-major or column-major register file! I would have never imagined such a thing. =)

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#143

Post by stephen_g » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 6:52 AM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #94

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fashion of the day is, for better or worse, "if you don't have a github you ain't shit."

git is overkill for facilities with small groups working in a common area (not hard to imagine if you're in the hardware biz) and all the engineers are used to cvs command syntax..

I'm struggling to think of a situation where Git could be overkill for anything... I've personally used it for hardware and software projects where it was just me, where it was used for small teams (3-5 people), and with hundreds of developers doing on a large code base. It worked well on al of them.

The only thing I would not use version control is if you have files that don't change. Everything else should be in some form of VC (sometimes Git is not the best choice, but it's good for lots of things)

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#144

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 8:03 AM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #94

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fashion of the day is, for better or worse, "if you don't have a github you ain't shit."

git is overkill for facilities with small groups working in a common area (not hard to imagine if you're in the hardware biz) and all the engineers are used to cvs command syntax..

On my one man team, the very first command I type on a project after mkdir is git init. Everything is logged and timestamped, and it is far from overkill. Git is easy to learn after working with CVS

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#145

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 8:05 AM UTC

pyre wrote: post #141

ozim wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those kids on HN think that everything cool was invented last summer by some new college grad, funny thing is most of stuff was already invented in 70's but who would care about prehistory of computing.

Yea. I totally remember Web Browsers, Big Data, and Terabyte hard drives back in the 70's. It's too bad that these things were lost to the ages, only to be re-invented in the present.

New names for old ideas.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#146

Post by bdamm » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 9:08 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #144

bdamm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git is overkill for facilities with small groups working in a common area (not hard to imagine if you're in the hardware biz) and all the engineers are used to cvs command syntax..

On my one man team, the very first command I type on a project after mkdir is git init . Everything is logged and timestamped, and it is far from overkill. Git is easy to learn after working with CVS

A one man team is very different from a 20-man team (which I still think counts as small).

Hey, I like git too. Respecting the needs of others not to spend mental load on learning something they don't want to is often important too.

Is it really worth it to spend time re-training the 15/20 engineers that don't already know git? I don't think so.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#147

Post by pja » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 9:26 AM UTC

This is genuinely great news & a vast improvement over the previous graphics driver!

Hopefully this means we'll see proper DRM / Gallium support for the IV & I'm looking forward to seeing what people can come up with now that they have full access to the GPU.

Congrats to Eben & the team - you've done good.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#148

Post by sneak » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 11:35 AM UTC

zxexz wrote: post #133

sneak wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Relatively open" in the way that your mother was "relatively pregnant" when you were born?

Are you suggesting he's a premie?

No, I'm suggesting that "relatively open" is semantically null.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#149

Post by makomk » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 11:37 AM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #57

zurn wrote: post #44

> In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver The Lima driver for ARM Mali is open source and runs Quake 3!

> The Lima driver for ARM Mali is open source and runs Quake 3! But the Lima driver was created by reverse engineering instead of using publicly available documentation.

Any open source replacement for the Raspberry Pi GPU driver is going to rely pretty heavily on reverse engineering too. The code they've released runs on the VPU, a custom-designed scalar processor within the VideoCore IV that Broadcom still haven't released architecture documentation or a toolchain for. Without a whole bunch of low-level reverse engineering (much of which was already in progress) it won't even be possible to compile the stuff Broadcom have released. Without working VPU code you can't even boot the Pi, let alone make use of graphics.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#150

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 11:53 AM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #111

gtlk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What/where is the assembler thar is used compile this code?

[deleted]