A birthday present from Broadcom • Hacker News Board

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#151

Post by bjackman » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 12:37 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #55

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)

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…

22 year old working in firmware department of major silicon IP company here (you can probably guess who - obviously standard disclaimer about I don't represent them).

My company selling IP rather than hardware makes it a bit easier, but: management is realistic and reasonably versatile. Attitude to proper technologies (e.g. using Github instead of releasing tar bombs over FTP) is good. Documentation is good, bar "don't document that or we will be sued" situations, which are too common. Testing sucks in certain areas but is good in most.

Obviously at my age I don't have much experience, but I thought the alternative view might be nice.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#152

Post by ansible » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 2:44 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #148

zxexz wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting he's a premie?

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

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

I don't know if you are familiar with the embedded world, but a large percentage of the offerings (specifically system on chip or SoC) have NDA requirements for the documentation.

And many of these platforms don't have a decent Linux port, even though they could support it.

Even with SoC vendors such as TI, the graphics core for the OMAP4 (for example) is a binary blob. There is no documentation for that, and no hope that situation to change (in part because TI has exited the mobile phone market).

Please tell us of your mobile platform experience, and what vendors you consider open or closed.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#153

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 3:07 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #130

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom. You could look at it that way if you like. But if you compare the rPi to the comparable low-priced educational development boards available when the project started (none). You might conclude that their marketing effort had a good and very real effect on the availability of low-cost edu dev-kits for both Broadcom SoC products and others'…

rPi is probably the most aggressively priced, but you talk about it like that market didn't exist. The BeagleBoard is probably the closest, though that was designed more as a dev-board for ARM processors and not a mini-computer like the Pi.

>but you talk about it like that market didn't exist.

For most practical purposes, it didn't. What existed were either inferior to rPi and more expensive (>4x) or approximately equivalent and much more expensive (>8x). It has had a significant positive impact on the way instruction is given.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#154

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 3:58 PM 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]

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#155

Post by ebenupton » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 4:09 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #149

wolfgke wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 po…

That's not correct. The code that's been released is for BCM21553, which doesn't have a VPU. There are bits and pieces of VPU assembler in there, but they're unused on the ARM target. The intention is that people port this (ARM-based) drop to run on the ARM on BCM2835. No reverse engineering required.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#156

Post by chii » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

jotux wrote: post #127

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)

Why would a large company release the commit history of source code when it could open them up to all kinds of lawsuits? It seems perfectly reasonable for them to release it as a zip.

why would the history of the commit open them up to law suits, but not the final product?

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#157

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

nitrogen wrote: post #145

pyre wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Based on that, SpaceX isn't a big deal, because of the Apollo program, right?

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#158

Post by makomk » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 6:30 PM UTC

ebenupton wrote: post #155

makomk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

That's not correct. The code that's been released is for BCM21553, which doesn't have a VPU. There are bits and pieces of VPU assembler in there, but they're unused on the ARM target. The intention is that people port this (ARM-based) drop to run on the ARM on BCM2835. No reverse engineering required.

Ah, that makes more sense, thanks! There's an awful lot of vestigial VPU-related stuff lying around the source tree, including what I'm guessing are the unused remnants of a dead build system...

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#159

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 8:18 PM 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.

[deleted]

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#160

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 8:21 PM 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.

[deleted]