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Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code releasedRaspberry Pi VideoCore driver code releasedPosted Oct 25, 2012 13:23 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released by dlang Parent article: Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released
but if you were talking about open-sourcing the application and software running on the first CPU, I would say that yes, the system on the first CPU was open-source, even though it called an independent system that lives on the second CPU. I think the objections people have to this announcement are mostly centred on the assertion that Broadcom have opened up access to the underlying technology when in practical terms all they have really done is acknowledged the nature of the API for specific functionality provided by the SoC. And all of this publicity downplays the fact that they've moved software behind the curtain and onto the proprietary CPU core. So although this release helps people to write software against that narrow API, it's very much business as usual. Does it make Linux any less free if it's running on a Transmeta CPU than on a 80386 CPU? Although you can have CPUs with loadable microcode, I don't think these arguments really help the discussion along because they inevitably lead to remarks like "You can't fabricate your own CPUs, and I suppose you extremists won't be happy until the proletariat have seized control over the means of production!" Far more illustrative is to consider things like printers supporting standard interfaces like PostScript. It's a positive thing that you can (or could) get a printer that any system could talk to using a well-defined (and hopefully standard) communications mechanism, but it's a different matter from being able to enhance the printer's own operation, if this is desirable. And it's always necessary to question the redefinition of system boundaries because you can easily end up with a dumb terminal talking to a proprietary mainframe that does all your graphics and printing for you. Or you have all your applications running in a proprietary cloud. And so on.
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Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released Posted Oct 25, 2012 20:26 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
did they move functionality, or has their chip always worked this way?
pushing functionality away from the main CPU and providing higher level abstractions and APIs is an ongoing process that has been going on as long as computers have been around.
The assertion is that everything running on the ARM processor is now open.
They have said for a while that the source for this userspace code was not going to be particularly interesting to people, but there was still a loud demand for this code to be opened. They did so and now people are complaining that it's not interesting.
no matter what you believe the boundary of openess should be, there is no doubt that this is a move in the right direction.
Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released Posted Oct 25, 2012 22:07 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
It's actually not correct to bundle things like abstraction together with where functionality has migrated to over the years, mostly because functionality has migrated in different directions, whereas the level of abstraction in the components of the average system has mostly increased.
For example, video control was indeed done by the CPU in various microcomputers and then migrated to dedicated circuits of different forms and with increased sophistication, but other activities - notoriously, modems and printers - have seen the CPU bear the bulk of the workload in various periods. Much of this depends on whether it is considered worthwhile to have dedicated hardware for a particular task that could be done in software running on general purpose hardware.
I agree that for practical purposes being able to build these "drivers" from source increases the general level of support for the SoC in Free Software projects and is thus an improvement on the previous situation, but given the limitations on actually modifying the system's behaviour (the objections brought up by various driver developers), it's clearly not the milestone that we've been sold by the announcement.
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