Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released [LWN.net]

Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released

Posted Oct 25, 2012 20:26 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released by pboddie
Parent article: Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released

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.

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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.