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Open Source ARM Userland

jealderson1

It has been announced today on the Raspberry Pi site that the userland libraries have been made open-source. This makes the BCM2835 on the Raspberry Pi the "first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers" (in the words of Alex Bradbury - the lead Linux developer at the Raspberry Pi foundation).

 

This should make life much easier for anyone looking to port different operating systems on to the Pi. With the GPU drivers opened up, it will mean that you can take advantage of the full hardware accelerated graphical capabilities of the BCM2835.

 

According to Alex, Broadcom are the first vendor of mobile phone SoCs to open up their drivers this way.

 

You can read the full announcement on RaspberryPi.org

 

Does this help anyone with their plans, or give them an idea? You can find the userland source on GitHub

 


Parents

  • This kind of movements make me angry because they seem to be made to hide the fact that the Broadcom chip being so closed could be correctly use for education purposes. I remember Abishur attacking people saying there was no need for more openess because we could use OpenGL and wrong arguments to give the impresion there was nothing to be fixed...

     

    Now they do and they say we have to say thank to Broadcom because nobody does that and we do not deserve it (Why would someone need to have source code anyway?).

     

    I had a bad feeling when I started my iterations with the people at the Foundation(tm) because the charity view the were supposed to take was difficult to asume for me. The other day I read somewhere some Eben quotes talking about his MBA and "developing the brand" and large amount of devices out... It's like they take a bizarre position just to achieve their purposes but one side ata a time. We have now the "good" side of openess and community benefit but I'm fearing the next movement for the "Bussinnes partners" (element14/farnell/RS and Broadcom in the dark).

Reply

  • This kind of movements make me angry because they seem to be made to hide the fact that the Broadcom chip being so closed could be correctly use for education purposes. I remember Abishur attacking people saying there was no need for more openess because we could use OpenGL and wrong arguments to give the impresion there was nothing to be fixed...

     

    Now they do and they say we have to say thank to Broadcom because nobody does that and we do not deserve it (Why would someone need to have source code anyway?).

     

    I had a bad feeling when I started my iterations with the people at the Foundation(tm) because the charity view the were supposed to take was difficult to asume for me. The other day I read somewhere some Eben quotes talking about his MBA and "developing the brand" and large amount of devices out... It's like they take a bizarre position just to achieve their purposes but one side ata a time. We have now the "good" side of openess and community benefit but I'm fearing the next movement for the "Bussinnes partners" (element14/farnell/RS and Broadcom in the dark).

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