Slashdot Mirror
Interviews: Ask Raspberry Pi Founder and CEO Eben Upton a Question
It's been roughly five years since we last interviewed the founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd., Eben Upton. Eben currently serves as a technical director and ASIC architect for Broadcom. He founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2009 to develop and market a $25 microcomputer for education. He has also founded two successful mobile games and middleware companies, Ideaworks 3d Ltd. and Podfun Ltd., and served a Director of Studies for computer science at St. John's College, Cambridge. Ebon has agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule and answer some of your questions.
You may ask Eben as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to Eben Upton himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.)
Go on, don't be shy!
You may ask Eben as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to Eben Upton himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.)
Go on, don't be shy!
the RE'd open source VC4 firmware, once feature complete, will finally quell open source advocates dislike of your claims that the Pi was a 'fully' open source system by allowing them to run their own software at all levels of Pi operation? If so, do you foresee any changes being made by broadcom in future revisions of the VC4 that will 'intentionally' break compatibility with the initialization code or see keyed firmware signing required at some or all levels of the Pi hardware, as has happened on Intel, AMD, and a variety of other ARM SoCs?
What do you think about RISC-V?
I recall years ago researching and seeing a post, I think by a broadcom employee, suggesting it would be fairly trivial if anyone were interested to have them modify the GPU firmware to support basic signed bootloading (keys and their management under full control of the device owner of course). I wonder if anything came of that, or could possibly come sooner rather than later (hint hint).
I can't quickly find the thread, but here is boot sequence outline from stackexchange
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/8480
Thank you for creating a such an awesome and useful little computer.
I've used Pi's to do everything from automatically watering my xmas tree to teaching a fourth grade class basic electronics to doing remote backups of my data (with a pi in my house and one far away at my buddies.)
That last operation suffers greatly from the lack of ram resources on a raspberry pi. My "pi" in the sky remote backup node has an SO-DIMM slot on the back I could stick a 8 or 16GB so-dimm in. 1-4 SATA ports so I write faster and a gigE ethernet interface.
I understand that you're under financial pressures to keep the cost down, but I see a real market for a Pi 3+.
Also, follow slashdotters... if there's a platform out there that accomplishes this that's not a proprietary NAS let me know. I've also investigated several microST motherboards but I don't want to have to deal with a "real" power supply, etc.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
The RaspberryPi is quite famously manufactured in the UK. Is this still a long term strategy or have recent events such as the Brexit and the rise of Pi competitors forced a review of the future of manufacturing in the UK?
Will wake-on-LAN be available on the RPi platform someday?
The Pi was designed as a cheap-as-chips (pun unintended) computer for classroom education. Obviously since then it's been put to a myriad of Other Uses. Which of these have struck you as the "best" or most unexpected usage outside the classroom?
What are the challenges in bringing a lower power display (e-ink or otherwise) to market?
Plans for non usb based networking?