Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi

Posted Mar 1, 2013 8:18 UTC (Fri) by hrw (subscriber, #44826)
In reply to: SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi by dlang
Parent article: SCALE: Marshmallow on Raspberry Pi

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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.