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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

You make it sound like there was an alternative, which at least at design-time, there wasn't.

On top of that, other vendors have pretty much the same problems. Take Intel's stuff for example. It doesn't work without a BSP and you can't even boot a system and have it on for over 30 minutes without a running Management Engine.

Qualcomm, AllWinner, Marvell, Ti, they all make ARM SoC's and they all need their own BSP's to work. Broadcom is not unique in this.

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No, Broadcom is quite unique in requiring blobs to boot. There are plenty of SoCs that are functional without firmware blobs.

Generally there are issues getting the GPU working well without firmware blobs but other aspects work fine.

Check out the Freescale part used in Bunnie's Novena laptop for example.

This is also the case for TI parts and the other manufacturers you list. Broadcom is somewhat unique in requiring a blob to even boot the system.

>No, Broadcom is quite unique in requiring blobs to boot.

Yes precisely, so we offer an alternative to those blobs that allows you to boot ARM without needing a closed-source firmware.

Spot on. BSP != "blob".

But isn't the blob in the Pi just that, for the GPU? It's the GPU that boots and then the CPU, not the other way around. Or does the blob contain both GPU code and CPU code? And how is this different from UEFI or BIOS, or option ROMs in video cards? AFAIK you have plenty of Broadcom chips that don't need a blob to boot, those in most routers for example. Sure. there are routers with redboot, u-boot, CFE etc. but they are not much different from a BIOS firmware in a PC.

Sure, but Allwinner did release their BSP under GPLv2, which the community summarily ported to mainline for the chunks they hadn't rewritten already.

Broadcom has yet to do anything like that.

https://github.com/allwinner-zh/linux-3.4-sunxi

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