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Serious Problems With USB and Ethernet On the Raspberry Pi

Posted by timothy on from the teething-pains dept.

First time accepted submitter rephlex writes "The USB controller used in the Broadcom BCM2835 (which is the SoC the Raspberry Pi uses) has buggy drivers which have been causing problems for many of its users. In addition to this, the Pi can only supply an unusually low amount of current to its USB devices, just 140 mA approximately, and using a powered hub to sidestep this limit exacerbates the issues caused by the USB drivers. Even Ethernet is affected as the Ethernet controller used on the Raspberry Pi is connected to the SoC via USB. This has resulted in packet loss and even total loss of network connectivity in certain situations. Attempts have been made in the past to fix the buggy USB drivers as there are other devices which use this problematic controller. None of these attempts seem to have achieved very much."

1 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. It's open! But with proprietary drivers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm still confused as to what the appeal of the Pi is.

    They keep touting the damned thing as "open", yet you require binary blobs in the kernel just to get it to boot. The hardware is only "hacker friendly" so long as you're using USB based devices or something that sticks off the GPIO ports, the hardware itself (especially the SoC they're using) is hardly hacker friendly because the entire thing is a proprietary solution that requires proprietary drivers to run.

    So can someone please tell me why this platform should be considered "open" at all? It seems to go against everything Linux strives towards. I could see a nice x86 based SoC with a S3 VGA adapter being "open"- all the hardware is well understood and open source drivers exist for everything. The Pi seems to be the exact opposite of that though.