Slashdot Mirror
ARM Code for Raspberry Pi Goes Open Source (Video)
"The Raspberry Pi project relies heavily on Open Source and Free Software — heck, it's targeted by more than one Linux distro. But some of the hardware stack that makes up the Pi itself needs closed-source code to run; the code that runs all kinds of low-level hardware is often closed source and closed off. I got wind from project instigator and lead Eben Upton that the system-on-a-chip at the Raspberry Pi's heart is about to get a lot more open. Says Upton: "We're about to open source all of the remaining closed source ARM code for the Pi. This will make BCM2835 the first ARM multimedia SoC with a fully-open-source ARM user and kernel implementation." I spoke for a few minutes with Alex Bradbury, who runs the Linux software work for the project, about licensing and what the new code means not only for Raspberry Pi but for users and other OS projects." (Note: the sound quality on this translantic Skype call is poor. We suggest reading the transcript.) Get the code while it's hot.
Hiding under the video is a "Hide/Show Transcript" link that displays a full transcript if you can't watch the video (or just prefer reading).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
I'm told that authorities are awaiting the results of an MRI for confirmation; but there are strong suspicions that Richard Stallman succeeded in burrowing in to Scott A. McGregor, concealing himself inside the host body, and gradually subverting the host's central nervous system.
Maybe he saw some money on it... They've sold about a million units just by virtue of supporting Free Softwre, how many more can they sell if they really support it? Anyway, it doesn't cost too much to find out.
Also, maybe the chineese promissing* that the A10 will have an entirely free stack helped a bit on this decision.
* As far as I know, they still didn't deliver it... But just the promisse should be enough to change Broadcom's strategy.
Rethinking email
Haven't had a chance to wade through all the code here, but it looks an awful lot like it's basically rpc stubs and glue (allocator, buffer management, etc) to remote the OGLES calls to the media processor, which presumably handles all the actual translation of OGLES API to whatever the internal architecture of the GPU looks like. Which is a perfectly reasonable approach, just not necessarily 1:1 with the other SoCs (which don't have a GPU block capable of speaking remoted OGLES, thus requiring knowledge of the underlying hardware "secret sauce" in the GL libraries or drivers on the host side).
Awesome that they're releasing this as open source rather than insisting on keeping it closed -- much easier to work with this way.