On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 08:24:49AM -0500, Dewey Hylton wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Theo de Raadt" <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org> > > To: "Dewey Hylton" <dewey.hyl...@gmail.com> > > Cc: misc@openbsd.org > > Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 6:32:21 PM > > Subject: Re: looking for hardware recommendations, x86 or otherwise. > > > > > i'm hoping the raspberrypi will eventually be supported on openbsd > > > (if the hardware proves to be stable, $35 sounds GREAT) but i don't > > > have the skills to go there myself. > > > > Wow. Dream on. It is a mess of firmware. You know nothing of our > > history? > > i know a bit of the history, sure. i know nothing of the raspberrypi > firmware, however. :) >
Well, people are clearly too busy raving about the price to ask the really hard questions. Is there documentation for the components on the Broadcom SoC? Afaik, there is _no_ documentation. We know it's supposed to be a weird architecture where the graphic core initializes the CPU and loads the loader from SD. We also know that the GPU requires a large blob in Linux. The Linux source is the only reference to the hardware. I have not looked (is it available already?) at it yet, maybe the Broadcom developers document it well. Or maybe they don't and just use magic numbers. In the case of OpenBSD, source code is not considered documentation! If all you have is the Linux source, you must implement it in pretty much the same way as Linux does. Including the bugs. That's not only extra hard, it's a huge waste of time, especially if there are better alternatives: There are tons of affordable ARM development boards out there whose makers publish mostly complete data sheets, errata and so on. Texas Instruments with the Beagleboard/Pandaboard is just one of them. (*) So, who should you reward, Broadcom with its anti-opensource attitude (while making decent amounts of money with billions of Linux routers) or companies who invest into making documentation available? PS: I'm ready to change my opinion about Broadcom by 1800, for just a couple of PDF uploads on their website... (*) Let me drive a nail in the RP coffin: It's an outdated (dead) ARM11 design, unlike what TI offers. Its only redeeming feature is the very fast GPU, which is very unlikely to ever work under OpenBSD, even if Broadcom would publish the SoC data sheet.
