Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 1, 2016 22:52 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Those are some fancy specs, but they're nothing special in today's market. Have they addressed the firmware elephant in the room?

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 2, 2016 5:47 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

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.

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 2, 2016 14:26 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (4 responses)

Indeed, this would be more interesting if the Odroid-C2 hadn't been released a few weeks ago.

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 2, 2016 21:22 UTC (Wed) by seneca6 (guest, #63916) [Link] (3 responses)

Sure, the specs look better. At some point I nearly got a C1. But there are two issues I have with their - and the other RPi competitors' - devices. Not so much real issues but rather lack of clarity and foresight on my part. First, has their safety for homes (especially radiation, electromagnetic noise) really been well-tested? I want to be able to put one of them under a shelf in my sleeping-room as a home server and forget about them being there. IIRC the first version of the RPi needed some kind of extra protection, which the foundation quickly built in before shipping.

Second, how long-lived is their community support? I like my devices to run until the hardware fails. Will I be able to get security updates for the current Debian distribution in 10 years' time? That's exactly what's keeping me from getting any kind of smartphone. Likelihood for software longevity grows with the number of units of the same model sold and the openness of the hardware, of course.

Finally, the last 4 years show how many excellent things the RPi Foundation has done. I'm happy to support them with my tiny purchases.

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 2, 2016 22:18 UTC (Wed) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

I've got a C1 and I'm not getting any of their newer stuff. Their supported OS is stuck in Ubuntu 14.04 and I doubt they're going to have support for the next LTS. Maybe I can get around to figuring out building a CentOS 7 userland for it (kernel 3.10 on both).

Raspbian on Pi is superior in every way. Updates and community matter more than pure specs.

Have to wonder though about 1 GB RAM on a 64-bit system for Rpi3. Here's hoping a 2-4 GB Rpi3+ sometime in the future. And a redesigned Ethernet/USB on Rpi4...

Now off to click a Buy link at MCM ;-)

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 3, 2016 14:28 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know anything about the radiation of the C2, and no-one knows anything about software updates 10 years into the future. My interest in the C2 is based on specs: it has a 2.0 GHz processor and 2 Gb of RAM, making it almost good enough for use as a desktop system. And it runs Ubuntu 16.04, so at least software support at present it good.

Fortunately I don't have to chose one over the other. The Pi 3 costs $35 and the C2 $40, so I plan to get them both. And whatever comes out next year, and the year after that. By then they probably will be good enough for use as desktop systems.

Raspberry Pi 3 is out

Posted Mar 4, 2016 8:03 UTC (Fri) by arekm (guest, #4846) [Link]

" no-one knows anything about software updates 10 years into the future" - well, if support is in upstream kernel thn it wouldn't be unexpected to still see that support in kernel after next 10 years.

The problem with odroid products is that their team is not interested in upstreaming work. Sadly.