On Friday, February 19, 2021, Pete Batard <p...@akeo.ie> wrote: > Why, when it is absolutely possible to achieve it, as was demonstrated on a cheap platform like the Pi (that actually comes with horrible quirks to be able to accomplish so, especially in terms of xHCI support), should end users have to juggle with heteroclitic means of configuring their system for OS installation?
because the product, designed by Broadcom, is not in the slightest bit targetted at end-users, and Broadcom do not give a flying f*** about such a tiny market of only 1 million a year in sales. their profit margins are too small to bother with us. Broadcom's Minimum Order Quantity for these processors, which are designed for mass-volume IPTV, Set Top Box and other multimedia computing appliances, is 5 million units and above. Normally Broadcom would provide the full software stack for the customer placing 5, 10, 50, 100 million orders for a complete solution. That customer *does not care* about the software boot process or some xHCI incompatibility. Have people forgotten already that the only reason the original PI exists is because Eben Upton was an employee who, having access to normally NDA'd documentation, worked on the PCB in his spare time? This was the only exception to Broadcom's normal MOQ rules, they could not exactly tell him to stop when he told them it was for educational purposes, could they? please understand: the manufacturers of these SoCs consider you, all Free Software idiots (including me) to be an absolute nuisance. i showed the manufacturers of my laptop the linux kernel boot process at Computex, they told me it looked like i was spying on their product! we are "lapping at the heels" of these massive Corporations. we are nothing to them. when we can place orders for a million processors, *then* they will listen to what you and I want, Pete. sorry if any of the reality check above shocks you. personally i got absolutely sick of the ongoing callous pathological exploitation of our collective expertise, many years ago, and started a new SoC initiative. it's entirely Libre. [and offtopic for the debian-arm list, so please if you would like to discuss that, contact me direct or on freenode #libre-soc]. l. -- --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
