[HH] proprietary CPUs

[Federico Lucifredi]

On May 25, 2012, at 4:00 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

> Federico Lucifredi wrote:
>>> Also, on the topic of openness, you should note that the Raspberry Pi
>>> isn't an open design, and uses a proprietary CPU, possibly requiring
>>> proprietary binary-only kernel drivers.
>> 
>> What do you mean by proprietary CPU here? It is a Broadcom SoC, but I
>> don't see what's more proprietary there than a Freescale or Ti
>> chip...
> 
> It may not be any worse or better. I'm just extrapolating based on what
> you hear about Broadcom chips used in routers. In the latter case it is
> well documented that the APIs for various bits of the chipset are kept
> proprietary, such that you need to use binary drivers provided by the
> chipset vendor.

I did check, and indeed there is a binary blob (wrapped in a F/OSS driver shim) to access the video functionality of the SoC.  I have to agree with you Tom… this is undesirable.  Seems to be the usual evil of video, nothing new - but moved into the SoC as part of the integration.

> (This is one of the reasons you can't run FreeBSD on
> consumer routers.)

Do you have a specific example? I wonder if there is more than video that is proprietary (and FreeBSD would run headless… I wonder where is the problem getting it to run on an ARM chip… probably more than the SoC in that case.


> I'm assuming the situation will be the same with the Broadcom chip used
> on the Raspberry Pi. They'll provide a binary driver that you can freely
> copy, so it'll be possible to port over other Linux distributions (as
> we've seen happen) that can work with the same kernel as the vendor
> supplied distribution, but if you want to do something more obscure,
> you'll be out of luck.

Looks like they supply a blob to integrate with your distro. 

I did notice that they have published the schematics for the board, so it *may* qualify as Open Source Hardware… we shall see, I don't see the logo on their site, so I won't make hte claim for them.

Best -F

_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C