> From: Laurence Rochfort <laurence.rochf...@gmail.com> > Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2017 05:45:50 +0000 > > How have the closed blob issues been overcome? I believed they were a > blocker for support of the Pi?
It's never been a blocking issue. The firmware that runs on the graphics core of the Pi is closed-source. This isn't really any different from firmware running on the GPU on a PC. The graphics core has almost unrestricted access to main memory of the Pi. But so has the GPU in a PC. But the firmware does run in a different address space. In the end the only weird thing is that the graphics core firmware plays a major role in booting the Pi and that the firmware needs to be present on the SD card that the Pi is booted from. At least the Pi firmware is redistributable. In the end the Pi isn't a particularly brilliant design. The USB controller sucks, the SD/MMC controllers are slow, the Ethernet controller is a USB device. On the other hand, the hardware is cheap, widely available and the hardware seems to be a bit more reliable than som of the cheap devices that come directly from China. So we decided that it was worth supporting anyway. The current Pine64 firmware contains a closed-source blob as well, which actually runs on the ARM CPU itself. It is unclear under what terms that firmware can be redistributed, which is why we don't offer Pine64 install media right now. But, completely open-source firmware for the Pine64 and maybe other Allwinner A64 and H5 based boards should be available soon. So if you're really paranoid you might want to use one of those boards instead. Cheers, Mark
