On Wed, 9 Feb 2022 at 14:17, Travis Siegel <tsie...@softcon.com> wrote: > > For what it's worth, the raspberry pi is an opensource board. That means > you could easily build your own pi using components from the original, and > have a company produce the board for you.
I think it's important to point out that this is *only* true of the very low-end Raspberry Pi Pico, with the RP2040 SOC. It is *not* true of the RasPi 1, 2, 3, 4, any model of the Pi Zero or any model of Pi Compute Module. _Some_ of the Broadcom SOCs from some of the other Pi models have been available, sometimes, but only in industrial quantities of from 50K to 200K units. You can't buy 1, or 10, or 100. Secondly, the software is not FOSS either. The main processor is not the ARM. They are a GPU with an additional ARM bolted on. The GPU runs the proprietary, closed-source ThreadX realtime OS, now owned by Microsoft, and not available on the open market. This means that the RPi firmware is not FOSS and never will be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX The GPU device drivers are not fully FOSS either. There are efforts to built totally FOSS GPU drivers but they are not complete yet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/raspberry-pi-4-higher-quality-faster-graphics-edge-closer-with-vulkan-support-via-mesa/ E.g. https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver For the current hardware only part of the functionality of some of the drivers is FOSS: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=326882 Only the ARM part of the OS is FOSS, and you can't load it without proprietary firmware. The GPU starts first, and it needs ThreadX; then it loads the ARM OS from µSD (or USB or LAN) into RAM and starts the ARM. For the first 5+ years, Linux was also useless without proprietary drivers: no Wifi™, no Bluetooth™, no graphics acceleration, etc. There was an attempt to reverse-engineer and build open-source firmware, but it didn't get far and halted some years ago: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware The Pico is a very low-end device, aimed at replacing microcontrollers: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/specifications/ 133MHz CPU, 264 kB of RAM. This is lower than a mid-1990s specification. It is not and never will be a general-purpose computer. TL;DR – Travis' statement is not true in any way for the generally-available mass-market Pis. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
