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SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry PiSCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry PiPosted Mar 1, 2013 7:15 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi by hrw Parent article: SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi
unless you are using coreboot (and frequently not even then), there is no system that you can boot without some binary blob somewhere
The Pi has a boot-time (BIOS equivalent) binary blob, and the GPU (video card equivalent) runs a binary blob. However, you have source to absolutely everything running in Linux (both the kernel and userspace, with no binary firmware blobs loaded by the kernel)
is this perfect? no. but it's pretty good
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SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 1, 2013 8:18 UTC (Fri) by hrw (subscriber, #44826) [Link]
As long as do not need any binary blobs on booting media I am fine. I can boot TI OMAP, Freescale i.mx3x/5x and few other CPUs without any blobs (in cpu bootloader does not count as I can not replace it).
r/pi still need bootloader blobs to get the GPU up which in turn boots up the CPU. And this is a thing which keeps me away from that old (due to arm11) platform.
SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 1, 2013 19:26 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
that's a fair position. Personally I like the fact that it's so easy to put in a modified 'BIOS' version and while I don't _like_ the fact that the boot partition needs to be FAT, it doesn't really bother me much.
They've already had several updates for the initialization blob, and more are expected (to enable the camera and display ports on the card)
But for people who would rather have such blobs in built-in flash or ROM rather than on the SD card flash that you boot from, I can see how the Pi would not fit your requirements.
SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 1, 2013 19:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, you can also write your own boot blob. There are people running the Pi hardware with their own OS developed from scratch who don't use the Pi boot blob. They aren't running Linux, and are little more than 'hello world' OSs, but it's being done.
SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 2, 2013 3:22 UTC (Sat) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
"unless you are using coreboot (and frequently not even then), there is no system that you can boot without some binary blob somewhere"
Nonsense. There are plenty of arm systems you can boot without any binary blob. I have dealt with several myself. And none are using coreboot.
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