All of the Allwinner stuff is equally useless, not sure what you are seeing there. Some registers for the PMIC, hurray.
Electronic chip manufacturers are scum, amoral leeches on a thriving ecosystem that is powered by largely opensource software.
Electronic chip manufacturers are scum, amoral leeches on a thriving ecosystem that is powered by largely opensource software.
Also, Broadcom is paying someone to write an open driver for the RPi GPU. They are literally the first company to do open GPU drivers for ARM-related GPUs.
No, the Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom GPU (VideoCore IV). ARM-related GPUs would be the Mali line, of which there is already an open-source effort (lima).
So Broadcom is paying someone to write an open driver for their own GPU. This doesn't benefit anyone else in the ARM ecosystem in the slightest. It's a Broadcom move for Broadcom's benefit alone.
I would not be so cynical. It'd be quite unlikely that properly upstreamed Mesa and/or kernel code wouldn't lead to any idea sharing or refactoring/optimization of the common code used by all drivers.
Both chips contain a CPU from ARM, so far so good. For the rest of the chip allwinner uses modern, well documented and battle proven components mainly from ARM. To save a few cents, broadcom uses undocumented home-gown crap that nobody understands. Just look at their crazy interrupt controller that can not do true multicore - which probably is one of the reasons pi3 is overheating.
That doesn't really speak to Allwinners open-source embracing nature.
But not everything here comes from ARM, look for example at their power management documentation which is (as always) proprietary. Can you point me to the same information in the broadcom datasheet?