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A birthday present from Broadcom

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Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#111

Post by wolfgke »

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…

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

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#112

Post by [deleted] »

ebenupton wrote: post #109
blah32497 wrote: post #97

Oh woah - I'm very happy about the BSD license. This means people can more easily potentially spin up business around this platform. I wonder why they chose it... Does anyone have any insight?

BSD-like licenses seem to be the standard for userland graphics libraries. There's a lot of useful stuff in there (for example the shader compiler) that may be of general use elsewhere, and we wanted to make sure people could use it. The 3-clause BSD is a compromise - we're happy for the stuff to be used but it's nice to get some credit :)

[deleted]

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#113

Post by blah32497 »

ebenupton wrote: post #109
blah32497 wrote: post #97

Oh woah - I'm very happy about the BSD license. This means people can more easily potentially spin up business around this platform. I wonder why they chose it... Does anyone have any insight?

BSD-like licenses seem to be the standard for userland graphics libraries. There's a lot of useful stuff in there (for example the shader compiler) that may be of general use elsewhere, and we wanted to make sure people could use it. The 3-clause BSD is a compromise - we're happy for the stuff to be used but it's nice to get some credit :)

Thank you for the clarification. It seems overly generous =)

Often code is GPL'd with pricey licenses for commercial applications - which always makes me think twice about investing my time into familiarizing with it.

I'm very impressed they aren't trying to make a quick buck here. It sounds like they have a very innovative long term strategy that will pay off many times over.

I think your competition is also fantastic, as it will encourage people to open source their improvements.

Thank you for all your hard work Dr.Upton

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#114

Post by zanny »

akiselev wrote: post #68
patrickyeon wrote: post #5

That's really a surprise. Broadcom is cemented in my mind as one of the hardest companies to get even basic datasheets out of. I know the saying is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth", but could it be that their graphics cores are not competitive in pure technical capabilities, so they've decided to compete on open-ness? I'm not really involved in that area of hardware/software.

Looking at the long term future of the market, Broadcom's move isn't surprising at all. Broadcom (and Qualcomm for that matter) is feeling a lot of pressure from Intel and NVidia, both of whom have a lot of new stuff that are scaring competitors (which is fucking great for us). They're scared not from just a technological or capital/market perspective, but also from a community exposure one. They're both firing on al…

> NVIDIA (and maybe Intel)

Intel has a huge workforce dedicated to open source. They fund huge chunks of kernel, Wayland, X and Mesa development, and I'm sure they have engineers on projects throughout the foss stack. Yeah, their hardware is pretty systemically evil patent drivel black box nonsense, and their chipsets are some of the most obscure bullshit ever, but everything past the firmware they do a good job on.

Nvidia on the other hand consistently blows whole stack. Their foss Tegra drivers are always, at most, 2d accelerated, and all their recent contributions to Nouveau (all two of them) are just to make SoCs bootable on novueau so you can install their blob driver.

Meanwhile, technologies like CUDA, GSYNC, PHYSX, etc are all proprietary platform locked messes that hurt open tech in general. So I'd definitely rank them way below Intel on a comparison of openness.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#115

Post by zanny »

paulofisch wrote: post #59

The main touchy-feely moment for me here is that a notoriously closed, $17-billion company was brought around by a friendly, gentle approach to convincing it to be more open. Group hug for Broadcom.

Same could be said of their (albeit paltry) wifi open driver support since 2011. They at least have one now, for very few chipsets. Doesn't work with any of the half dozen Broadcom NICs I have in my "junk parts" bin, though.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#116

Post by Elv13 »

pm90 wrote: post #98
Elv13 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My university (Montreal ETS) also do it. They have 3 (real/full) semesters per years. Students usually take 1 of them per year to work as interns. You can technically work as intern for like 5 years and still be considered enrolled into the engineering program. Students will either prefer 8 months internship for well paid jobs or jobs that cannot be done in a 4 months development cycle(like a video game). In the end,…

Its a sweet deal for companies if you think about it. Maybe benefits are different in Canada, since I heard that the Govt. provides healthcare, but in the US, the employer has to provide that. Plus, more salary, 401(k) etcetc. Actually, from another viewpoint, for small companies its very beneficial to hire interns; they can be used to work on projects which might be interesting but have low financial returns. Which…

Interns are being paid in every fields but medicine and education. Some technical schools (including mine) will refuse internships paid anywhere near minimum salary (they care way to much about the statistics and marketing, which is, in turn, a good deal for students too). I am not claiming it is Klondike for every interns (it's not), but having a ~20$/h-30$/h mostly tax free salary is really helpful to avoid loans with interest. Education is not very expensive in Quebec, fees will be around 6k$ / year (9 15 weeks courses + 1x internship fees, books/material not included) but after adding the cost, of life, the rent, food and everything, it get to around 20k$/y. Given the state provided healthcare and services the first quarter* of the citizen have to pay for, it is even financial beneficial to some people.

*(The other three would be elders, children and the ones below poverty threshold)

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#117

Post by hermanhermitage »

jxf wrote: post #21

If you want to go straight to the horse's mouth and just start hacking (this is Hacker News, after all!), the Broadcom downloads are here: * BCM21553 VideoCore IV graphics driver source: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/Brcm_Android_... * BCM21553 VideoCore IV documentation: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A...

For those interested, as far as I understand it this release doesn't include VPU or QPU assembler tools.

We released a QPU assembler at https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv-qpu/blob/mast... a couple of weeks ago. And a reference javascript VPU assembler is due very soon (mirroring the path taken with the QPU assembler).

Because our own work was independent and pre-dates this information by a couple of years (in the case of the VPU), we have some alignment work to do in terms of mnemonics.

This release adds a lot of knowledge to the table - extending our understanding beyond the core instruction sets (which were already well reverse engineered) into a deeper understanding of the various hardware registers.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#118

Post by ebenupton »

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 { ...…

Fancy meeting you here :)

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#120

Post by ebenupton »

polshaw wrote: post #66
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.

Are you able to give any indication what might be included (or not) in such minimum functionality?

The ability to boot a kernel with USB (and thus Ethernet) running. Probably not display in the first instance (we're hella-resource-constrained), but we'd want to add that later on.
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