Is it truly amazing? I was under impression that Raspberry requires some blobs to run properly. Is there detailed specifications for Broadcom chip they're using? I was under impression that it was NDA and not possible to obtain for ordinary mortal. So may be it's good because of sheer number of people tinkering with it and smoothing rough edges, but it could be better. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> All Raspberry Pi models before the 4 (1A, 1B, 1A+, 1B+, Zero, Zero W, 2, 3, Zero 2 W) boot from their GPU (not from the CPU!), so they require a non-free binary blob to boot
So the 4 (and I suppose the 5, if it ever actually comes...)
Goes on to say:
> Since then, Broadcom publicly released some code, licensed as 3-Clause BSD, to aid the making of an open source GPU driver. The "rpi-open-firmware" effort to replace the VPU firmware blob started in 2016. See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703842 . Unfortunately development of rpi-open-firmware is currently (2021-06) stalled.
So there you are. Not wrong, are you, but not strictly correct, depending on "...to run properly" definition
You're right. Pretty much all the low level stuff below the kernel in a pi is closed source.
Want your own custom boot rom so you can start up in half a second rather than the default 3 seconds before linux gets loaded? - sorry, we can't share the code for that with you, nor the specs for you to write it yourself!
That's not what they meant. Yes, anybody can write bare metal alternative to Linux ( at the very least by looking at the Linux codebase). But still that Pi 1541 depends on the bootcode.bin, fixup.dat and start.elf binary blobs, which the OP was complaining about.
It wasn’t clear to me what they meant. I’m not familiar with the details of boot.bin but my read of what GP was implying was you had to use the rapsbian kernel and drivers. Thanks for the information.
