Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 2, 2016 5:47 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: Raspberry Pi 3 is out by flussence
Parent article: Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Have they addressed the firmware...

People are making good progress, with substantial support from the RPiF for some projects, and completely hobbyist efforts for other projects. The VC4 graphics driver for Linux seems to be coming along nicely. You can use the kernel with Device Tree if you want. There's a continual trickle of the firmware blob drivers being rewritten into ARM Linux drivers and upstreamed. There are a few independent ports of uBoot. Once all those come together the only worthwhile thing the blob does is to start the RAM. That's easily enough re-written as free software assembler shim which initialises the RAM and calls uBoot. That might well be written by the RPiF; or if they chose not to the instruction set of the QPU is well enough understood to reverse engineer the relevant parts of the blob and write an equivalent in assembler (and there are a few QPU assemblers).

I'd expect a completely Free Software RPi to be possible by late 2016/early 2017. The RPiF haven't committed to a date. As far as goals go their staff have stated the goal of "eventually free" and people are keen to help that eventuality come sooner.

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 2, 2016 17:21 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

That actually sounds a lot better than I was expecting. I was aware something was happening with the GPU, didn't know the rest of it was being worked on so much.