New Raspberry Pi 4 Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C
cnx-software.com
cnx-software.com
I work in a office where the air conditioner is set to 28°C
Wow. As someone who is used to a room temperature of 20C, 28C is above the point of idle sweating and becoming lethargic. While that's still within the range that most consumer electronics are rated for, I believe a room temperature of 20C is the normal design target.
I'm from Australia and in summer the cooling can't cope and does indeed result in indoor temperatures exceeding 28°C. However, I'm drenched in sweat and certainly can't focus at that point. I will happily head outside and enjoy the crazy heat, but be productive? Nope!
I think heating and A/C target around 21°C in Melbourne.
However, I traveled to Vienna for a week long contract some years back. Sure it was cold outside (snowing), but I found all the offices and buildings excruciatingly hot and couldn't focus one bit. Made for a very miserable working week.
Of course, the locals all managed fine, so despite it seeming like a personal preference thing, I can only assume it's something you can adapt to.
Every time I work in an office with a large and diverse enough population I have to endure stuffy warm air in winter and being blasted by cold wind in summer.
I find it ridiculous, but, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt and sandals outside I have to keep a hoodie at my desk just to survive the office summer.
> OSHA recommends temperature control in the range of 68-76° F and humidity control in the range of 20%-60%.
When my desk thermometer started reading 76F+
Here is the thing, you can put on another layer of clothing or using a blanket, I cannot take off a layer of skin and my office does not allow for shorts/tank tops.
A lot of the buildings are able to cool passively e.g. by keeping open a window to hallway and to the street which in old buildings results in a steady airflow.
Air condition only increases the cities temperature further so passive solutions are prefered.
Apparently it originates in Latin so it's no surprise that it's shared between many European languages.
ACs are more than just fans – they are basically fridges for your room, and like every thermodynamic machine they produce more heat than they can cool. Only not in your room but outside.
AC means cooling your room while heating your city.
[0]: https://www.cnrm-game-meteo.fr/IMG/pdf/demunck_2013_ijc.pdf
In the UK (where I live) I believe the recommended guideline is 21-24c
My theory is that it's more about not-to-exceed ceilings [or the converse, floor] temperatures rather than average temperatures. When you have the huge temperature differential between the conditioned space and the outside, opening a door or something can affect the conditioned space's mean temperature by a huge amount for a short time. By over-conditioning or over-heating a space, you're more likely to be able to ensure the interior temperature never rises over ~75F, than if you'd set it at a comfortable 72F or so. Or in winter, it won't drop below a minimum comfortable temperature indoors when someone has to go outdoors.
Of course, once you've adapted to that habit, you may not always make seasonable adjustments to those settings.
Works well for much of the year, but summers can get a bit out of hand, depending on whether the aircon has sufficient capacity.
I work in a workshop, so it’s both colder and warmer for longer depending on the season.
The -4 degree mornings don’t effect my cognitive not physical abilities, but the 30+ degree days certainly do. I have to constantly remind myself to slow down.
I mean I leave the heat on 19 during the cooler months.
During summer here I’ll have the cooling set between 21 and 25.
Would love to get all the complainers here to spend one month in winter where I live. We frequently have -35 to -45°C outside, and +30-35°C inside. How about a 70°C temperature difference?
By prayer. It happened a couple times, although not yet on the city scale.
I don't personally know anyone who was affected. What they did, according to the local press, was stuffing every crack and cranny with old rags and sleeping fully clothed (as in fur coats and the like) and under as many blankets as they could get their hands on.
It's standard advice to keep blankets or the like in your car for this specific scenario. Besides, for the majority of people in the Nordic contries, their normal winter comforter is warm enough to keep them warm should the heating fail.
Those people were ready, when you live your whole life in such environments you quickly get "infused" with a lot of experience that was accumulated over generations.
So I'd be more worried about people in a regular country getting severe low temp weather than a failing heating system in one region used to extreme cold.
Of course, instead of opening the windows, you could always install a gate valve (or whatever it is called in English) and close it to make the water go through your apartment's heating elements without actually (mostly) heating them, and that's what they recommend, but why bother? The level of self-entitlement of many people here, you wouldn't believe. I could tell stories all day long.
Like a caricature of a stereotypical American tourist.
In the basement of my building there's a heat exchange, which uses the steam to heat water. This water is piped around the building.
My fairly new apartment has a meter fitted on that hot water pipe. It measures how much heat I extract from the water, and I'm charged accordingly.
In some older buildings, they have some sort of temperature logging device on each radiator. I assume this is to charge the residents according to their usage.
The trend is towards heating the water less, houses are getting better insulation, less energy is needed, and the hotter water is more expensive when heated by a heat pump and also in losses.
In each building there is a system which takes the district heat and uses it to heat the water of the building. Both hot tap water and central heating. But the water is separate from district heat, so in each building the temperatures can be adjusted.
In older buildings you still have the issue you describe on a macro level - apartments on the bottom floor are too hot, and on the top are too cold - but it doesn't matter how close or far your building is from the district heating station.
I mean, how much coal do you have to burn to warm the air outside by 10-15°C?
I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way.
What I've heard is that some portion of pension is given as free heating. So it makes no sense for the individual to conserve it. Giving it as money and then billing for the heating could create some other problems too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka
These buildings were developed in massive numbers back in post-WW2 years, across the whole Soviet Union. with the task to move people out of barracks in some sort of relatively comfortable housing. Back then there wasn't much money to spare (still isn't). They typically have pretty bad insulation and are built out of, as we say, "cardboard" walls.
When it's cold enough outside (-35°C and lower), you can see the energy losses with a naked eye, as hot air escapes through every crack in the building (and there are a lot of them). No need for thermal cameras.
People over here just don't give a fuck about nature. Now it's the middle of summer, it's +33°C outside. I am sitting in the office with two ACs running at full capacity and with all windows open, because "there isn't enough air". I tried arguing with this, but it's pretty difficult to go against all my coworkers at once. It's a cultural problem, and I have no idea how to fight this.
Thanks for the sanity check, though, at least I know it's not me going crazy.
> I am sitting in the office with two ACs running at full capacity and with all windows open, because "there isn't enough air". I tried arguing with this, but it's pretty difficult to go against all my coworkers at once.
When people complain about not having enough air it's almost always mean that ventilation system in building is insufficient and there in fact too much of CO2.
About a half also smokes, and then they "don't have enough air".
By the way, the office faces an arterial road, as they are called, with heavy traffic right outside. When you open a window, it fills very quickly with traffic fumes. This gives me persistent headaches almost every day.
Is it really better than CO2?
> They don't seem to have any problems in the middle of winter, when windows stay fully closed for at least 3 months each year.
Also oxygen consumption and overall feel can be affected by temperature of environment.
> About a half also smokes, and then they "don't have enough air".
> Is it really better than CO2?
Personally I don't smoke and have healthy lifestyle, but I still extremely sensitive CO0 and without proper ventilation I just can't work efficiently if at all. So any room I stay in will always have open window no matter if there is AC working or not.
So it's great that you don't have same issue, but please keep in mind that people not just imagining things. Yeah they can quit smoking and watch their health, but CO2 is still extremely important. If you don't believe me rent some air quality meter and check it for yourself.
It's cheap low-quality coal with high sulfur content. The level of air pollution it produces is insane. In winter time you can feel the taste of coal on your tongue. The level of visibility is like 150-200 meters, after that it's a solid grey wall. Nobody here cares though, and if you do, you pick up your things and move elsewhere. That's what I am currently preparing to do.
You'd have to be in a pretty small community, not a City, in maybe NU?
"I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way."
Only if the ones who can't handle the higher temperature somehow die and/or struggle to reproduce, rather than turn up the air conditioning.
Evolution "cares" about one and only one thing - spreading of relevant genes. Technological advances means there's almost no difference in terms of procreation between more and less heat tolerant people.
If that doesn’t work try lowering your body fat percentage. That’s also has a big impact on heat tolerance.
Work in the cold too, in about two weeks my body accepts working at 16 degrees and I hardly have to heat my apartment.
A guy once told me that they install thermostats in corporate buildings that are actually disconnected from the system because people complain less if they can see thermostats in the room.
Basically, in the winter, we need to wear jackets while sitting at our desks in a place like JHB simply because the ventilation for some reason is pretty cold. I've heard that in European businesses you take off all your warm clothes indoors and just wear a T-shirt or other shirt.
There is also what we call it the "aircon" war. Usually black people (and myself) want the aircon off, but white people want it on. This is a joke though so don't take it too seriously (or racially). But this is mostly about when the aircon is cooling the building. When it is supposed to heat the building in a colder region most people will agree that the rooms are too cold, but for some reason we can't seem to learn this lesson.
By the way, for the sake of interest, Jan Smuts was well known for having a house with very cold winters and very hot summers. It is said that his guests would often comment on this when they stayed over. [1]
[1] Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness. Richard Steyn
We have "aircon" wars over here in Romania, too. I'm now working from home but in the previous ~15 years of me working from an office one of the major stresses while moving in with new office colleagues was "will we be able to not kill each other in the summer over how the AC should work?" (I'm exaggerating, but only by a bit).
We also have what we call "curent" which is translated to "draft". There are many online articles about how foreigners view our (Romanians') obsession with "curent", this [1] is just one of them.
[1] https://jsbangs.com/2011/12/13/draft-romanias-silent-killer/
You see more people investing in double glazed windows like they do in Europe. I've done this to my house and it works really well against both heat, cold and sound. Combined with an efficient fireplace, you can enjoy a toasty winter in the cold winter evenings.
EDIT: Okay well of course it should be as this is what you have done already. So, maybe what I am asking is how complicated is the process...
I have yet to experience an aircon war in Germany, but there is also a pattern where men want to open a window to keep the air fresh, while women find it too chilly and want to turn on a radiator instead (of course there are exceptions).
I can't get much done in radiator air, so that's one more reason to work from home, or in well-matched office rooms.
This tends to happen a lot in environments where business attire is a must. It's harder to find a good compromise when some people wear business suit and tie and some wear skirts or open shoulders. And that's even before you factor in possible physiological factors (people have different comfort zones).
If you've got menopausal women that's a problem too, and I think perhaps women and men just have different temperature preference distributions.
My kids teachers (all female) refuse to let the boys wear shorts except in Summer term because the teachers consider it not to be warm enough .. but they wear skirts and dresses all year .. which is weird.
Established norms on dress and room heating/cooling are pretty arbitrary I feel.
I bundled all that under "physiological factors". There are also sociocultural factors at play but that's a minefield of a discussion. It's how gender stereotypes are born and educated into kids from a young age.
I think the range stems from a European regulation, although I’m not particularly sure.
All air conditioner remote controls I've seen default to 24C whenever the batteries are replaced, so I believe 24C is the "standard" room temperature that AC manufacturers aim for.
If you begin shivering at 20C, put on a woolen sweater or the like. It's more comfortable anyway, because your body keeps the temperature that's optimal for it.
That got me curious, so I went looking: the official guideline for Brazil is in the range 23C - 26C in the summer, and 20C - 22C in the winter (http://portal.anvisa.gov.br/documents/10181/2718376/RE_09_20...). But I question that division between "summer" and "winter": it's in the middle of winter right now, and the predicted high temperature for today is 33C (it's been feeling like summer for several weeks already).
> If you begin shivering at 20C, put on a woolen sweater or the like.
It seems wasteful to cool the air from over 30C to 20C, just to have nearly everyone wear heavier clothing, instead of cooling it to something like 22C where everyone can use normal street clothes.
Oh I agree, I was talking (not clearly), from my own context where we don't have to cool the office, but heat it, in that case it's the efficient choice.
The weird thing is I have no issues going outside in the heat - I used to live in the middle east and would walk outside at lunch, when it was 45c/110F+ - I just can't comfortably sit at a desk and work in the heat.
A few years ago I was living and working in an apartment where in the winter it was as low as 16c/60F. I much prefer too cold than too hot. I can combat cold just by wearing more layers, especially thick socks, and drinking more tea. Does that not work for some people?
At a guess it's something to do with power management and link idling. Version 0 of the firmware might leave the link up all the time with constant traffic; a later version gets it to power down, and along the way someone has to test and fix all the cases where it fails to power down or back up.
Feels weird to me, but college and people's homes are usually set to mid-70F too (or ambient temperature).
The way I see it you always long for what you don’t have. That is why in torching hot places they tend to cool things really down and wear long pants and a second layer, while in northern nations people will run around in shorts and thin dresses literally the first time it seems to be a little bit summerish.
I think that big of a temperature difference is not only a tremendous waste of energy (that heats the rest of the outside at the same time), but it is also quite impractical: you always have to carry around a second layer if you are planing to stay somwhere for more than an hour. There you are, carrying around that hoodie, just because the rooms are cooled down to much.
In California, I'm actually trying to escape the heat, which sometimes gets as high as 46C here. The setting on my home AC is 22C.
I guess my point is that your preferred AC setting can differ greatly depending upon the outside conditions.
>, I'm actually trying to escape the heat, which sometimes gets as high as 46C here. The setting on my home AC is 22C.
wait what? how does the weather outside have any bearing on what your comfort temperature inside should be? i mean, if you think 26C is comfortable, why would you need to turn it down to 22C in CA, where it's probably even drier?
Thus, it wouldn't surprise me if the RPis perform better at 18C than they do at 28C.
Humidity also plays a big factor. In the southern US, most people have their AC set to between 23C and 25C during the summer and somewhere around 20C in the winter. In more arid regions the temperature settings creep up because you tend to feel cooler when it is dryer.
Depends on what you are used too. Depends also on the ambient humidity levels since it affects how you feel at the very same temperature.
28°C does sound too hot to me. 25°C is very pleasant IMO.
The infrared photos I saw somewhere suggested the entire board heats up so quite plausible that weird stuff affect temp as measured centrally
I’m much more familiar with x86 hardware, but missing PCIe ASPM is a big deal. Some chipsets can’t properly idle themselves if any PCIe link is non-idle.
Usually you don't want room temperature to be more than 5C lower than outside. Bigger contrast can be a problem for people.
My eyes couldn't handle the dry air. It was unbearable. One of my colleagues was prescribed subscription eyedrops and another developed an eye condition.
After unsuccesfully trying to negotiate some sort of change to a more sustainable environment with the team of managers I evently started sitting in the above-ground building until I was repremanded and told I had no choice but to sit in that room.
Part of the reason I left that team was to protect my eyes and my health. Other people in the room thought 30 celcius was generous and that it should have been hotter if the aircon could do so. Seems utterly absurd to me.
1: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/730438603/the-battle-for-the-...
I hope this does not mean that my hardware is suffering too much, though! I do underclock everything (Laptops) to around 700MHz, but still... looks like I'll stick to the Raspi 3 for now.
1) Cold at work, warm outside. Need different clothing at work, such as a longsleeve.
2) When switching from traveling to/from work the difference in temperature is huge.
Luckily the french have a law saying that you shouldn't heat above 21°C and shouldn't cool below 26°C, and I'm a huge fan of this law, everyone should adopt it.
I took it to mean that the USB controller was doing double duty holding the now reflashable firmware for the main processor. Still a little weird, but makes a bit more sense.
How are you usually dressed?
In Japan 28 degrees is a normal summer aircon temperature. In summer the average high is 30+ degrees with 70%+ humidity
AC should not to be used for more than delta 8C. Maybe 10C. For Americans: if it's 104F outside it shouldn't be set to less than 86F. Setting to the customary 68F is very bad for your health.
Here's a good read: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/why-keeping-ourselves...
We should turn off winter heating too then as that is probably as bad as Airco
BTW I am from a tropical country and I live in mid-northern Europe now, this argument not really fair, the amount of energy (electricity and gas) used here to keep people alive during winter is 10x larger than in my home country during summer.
A/C is necessary in most parts of the world. I'm European as well and I can't work past 20C, which is why I have A/C and table fans to keep me cool.
Additionally, having a too large difference between inside and outside isn't just annoying but actually dangerous and even painful when going from 18°C indoors to 34°C outdoors.
Does that include refrigerators ?
In Southern Europe they are everywhere.
Since one of the popular uses of the Raspberry Pi is to be an emulation box, this will mean it will now be capable of running most of the N64, Dreamcast and PSP library comfortably. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ could barely handle even select easier-to-emulate titles of these systems. It might even start running a handful of GameCube and Wii titles now using Dolphin. It also helps it to run tricks to vastly reduce input lag that troubles most emulation setups [1]. And the nice thing is that all of that should even work on the cheapest 1GB model.
It's even conceivable this can be used as a desktop in many ways. It is faster than some Chromebooks. However this will probably only truly enjoyable to use when using PXE for its main OS drive to have I/O performed on a server that can leverage SSD storage.
Mind you that the software is in a very pre release state, so none of this is really doable at the moment of writing. Especially the VideoCore (GPU and hardware video codec) driver seems to be in quite a sorry state and there's not even a hint of Vulkan support. The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though.
[1]: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-ra...
Though that may admittedly be cognitive dissonance, since I've been trying to talk myself into purchasing a Jetson for more than a month now.
On top of that, in basic initial benchmarks using OpenArena the GPU only shows a 50% improvement over the RPi 3B+, which is still using the same GPU architecture the RPi launched with in 2013. That benchmark doesn't test shader performance so it's not the best indicator, but it doesn't make the chip look any more impressive either.
I think Broadcom is not spending the R&D resources required to keep their graphics architecture up to date. It's a shame because the GPU of the original Raspberry Pi was really good for its time, and maybe the most impressive specification it had.
If you want to do graphics/compute tasks on an SBC the Nano (or just the full uncompromised Nvidia Shield TV) will undoubtedly be superior.
So it not having a modern featureset is a result of more driver issues. It's clear that this hardware has been a surprise release. Oh well, even then using an Nvidia Jetson gives you way better software support for graphics / compute tasks in the forseeable future.
[1]: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...
[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3D-Comp...
I wonder how the whole software ecosystem compares tho.
That's not unique to RPi. It's true for all kinds of SoCs from amlogic, through rockchip to allwinner, and probably others.
Def made me reconsider buying anothrr non rasp board even if stronger
Would be nice to see those measurements, as RPi 4's idle consumption (initial reports of ~3 watts) is quite poor compared to RPi 2B and 3B's ~1 watt.
Possibly a stupid question: what does “VLI” stand for?
A couple of years ago I bought a USB-C drive enclosure, and when I use the Windows "safe removal" menu it shows up as "VLI Product String".
Yes, the case manufacturer didn't bother changing the string in the sample VLI firmware!
So this is definitely welcomed. But heatsinks or even fans will likely be necessary to do anything with the pi 4
I'm just curious to see if that helps much, they're pretty cheap and could be useful other places too (I use one on the VTX for my drone)
You can check the temperature though the pi itself. From my experience depending on the material/length of contact, things start to get too hot to comfortably hold after ~55C/60C for most metals, but brief contact might barely feel warm.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Easycargo-Raspberry-Heatsink-Aluminum...
Only thing that really helps is active cooling / moving the air. You also have to figure out the placement of the board. The air will move via convection, and if you get air movement from a hotter part of the board (PMIC) to the SoC, you'll not improve things much.
I don't think perf gains in Rpi4 are of much use, if it idles at 65°C (my ambient temperature is ~32°C at home) and has to throttle down to <1GHz under persistent load.
That already helps a lot if you don't need to maintain full power for long periods. It gives just enough thermal inertia to handle spikes without throttling. For extended periods you may need to move to bigger heatsink or active cooling.
But again I've only seen ~30% improvement in CPU workloads, a far cry from "3x the performance" that I keep seeing.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/wp-content/uploads/2019/06...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/wp-content/uploads/2019/06...
And Chrome as a whole is memory hungry.
And those fins should help convection in most orientations.
Without fan, idle: 58°C peak
With fan idle: 39°C (roughly 26°C ambient temperature)
With fan 4x parallism of `yes > /dev/null`: 51°C peak
The fan is a really small one, just for the CPU. And I didn't quite place in the center of the chip :/ Quite surprised of how much I overestimated idle temperature. 58°C feels really hot when you touch the SoC.
> 58°C feels really hot when you touch the SoC.
This obviously depends on the heat conductivity of the surface, but from my experience with my 3D printer, ~55C/60C is about the cutoff for pain tolerance for me. Just below that temperature is holdable, after that temperature is when it's painful to touch.
The SoC firmware is loaded from the FAT partition on the SD card, so there is no “flashing” (in the traditional EEPROM sense) of the system firmware. Apparently the USB chip has its own EEPROM?
With the Pi 4, this was no longer possible. The Pi 4 uses a much more complicated way of booting up as well as some RAM tricks inside the SoC to allow for more than 1GB of RAM to mostly work without redoing all of the SoC (e.g. the VPU and Hardware Codec Blocks still only sees 1GB of RAM, but they will never need more than 1GB of RAM, as far as I know). This Pi no longer uses the `bootcode.bin` file older Pis used for this reason.
Because of this, the Boot ROM is now a 500K EEPROM, which can be updated to allow things like USB boot, PXE boot, and similar to be added after launch. The USB Controller also has it's own EEPROM, which handles different things (I think).
Can these two EEPROMs at least be flashed through test points, so they can be recovered without de-soldering if they're corrupted? (The RPi4 schematics on the site are next to useless.) That would also allow dumping both EEPROMs to compare them with a "known good" copy, in case there's any suspicion they've been maliciously modified.
This is all documentation on the SoC EEPROM available. (I don't believe there is any USB EEPROM information publicly available at the moment.)
The good news: You don't need de-soldering to fix them. If you should corrupt the EEPROM, you can plug in an SD card with a special 'recovery.bin' file on it and it will re-flash the EEPROM itself. (This does mean that the Pi _technically_ has an extremely tiny boot ROM permanently installed in it still, but all it does is repair the boot EEPROM if it is damaged and start that boot EEPROM if it isn't damaged).
You can also write-protect the EEPROMs with a special soldiered-on resistor on the board.
As for dumping, no public info yet.
It is very common for a controller chip (USB, ethernet, bluetooth, wifi, SATA, etc) to contain a firmware EEPROM.
Whether you can flash this firmware without an hardware programmer depends on the implementation. For embedded systems like the rPi, it is common for the engineers to implement peripheral programming capabilities from the main processor.
Most laptops have that capability too, on both my Apple and Lenovo laptops i've seen firmware updates happening. On generic PC motherboards, this is less common.
It comes down to the board designer connecting the programming pins of the peripheral device to the main CPU I/O.
"The ARM cores are capable of running at up to 1.5 GHz, making the Pi 4 about 50% faster than the Raspberry Pi 3B+. The new VideoCore VI 3D unit now runs at up to 500 MHz. The ARM cores are 64-bit, and while the VideoCore is 32-bit, there is a new Memory Management Unit, which means it can access more memory than previous versions."
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
So, MAYBE?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_ma...
Edit: This could also be why the SoC uses an EEPROM. The RPF said that booting the Pi4 with this new memory system is _much_ more complicated than booting a Pi3, and that permanently burning the boot code into the SoC (like on the Pi3 and earlier) was not an option for the Pi4. Extremely high risk of backfiring.
The Pi 4 upgrades the SD controller system (almost entirely) and is SD50 compliant, which means the SD card bus is roughly twice as fast as older models.
[1] https://www.usb3.com/whitepapers/USB%203%200%20(11132008)-fi...
1) Broadcom has quite a bit of stuff they want hidden and don't allow any of their many customers (including the Pi) to open-source.
2) The Pi 4's SoC has a hardware H.264 block and hardware H.265 block. Older Pi's had a hardware MPEG-2, hardware VC-1, and hardware H.264 block. These blocks require royalties and are _heavily_ protected by MPEG LA. If open-source software was released that could control these blocks, you could possibly expect a huge lawsuit against the Raspberry Pi Trading arm.
3) To the Pi's benefit, the VideoCore is not open-source but is the most openly-documented GPU available in a mobile device. Most Pi competitors use Mali, which if you look at Hackaday's Pine64 Un-Review, works with almost nothing and has wretched documentation. There is some open-source work, but quite a bit remains closed or completely inoperable on Linux.
4) If you need platform security, look elsewhere. The Pi doesn't support secure boot, licensed code signing requirements, and the new Pi 4 allows almost anyone to update the USB and SoC EEPROMs just by putting in a new SD card and running a few commands.
5) Cortex-A72 on Pi 4 is venerable to Spectre.
I think you're confusing copyright and patents. Just because some technology is patented, it doesn't mean it can't be open sourced.
Edit: Even if the RPT wrote their own firmware, not from Broadcom, and released it, they would still risk being sued to pieces for patent violations galore. After all, if you license H.265 alone, there are over 1,100+ pages in the Table of Contents alone just listing all of the patents worldwide on it.
Edit 2: And they could be possibly sued by Broadcom for violating the IP sharing agreement used for developing the chip by developing an open-source blob software.
If I buy your patented thing from you, that exhausts your patent rights for that copy of the thing. If I modify it, and do something you don’t like with it, you can’t come after me under patent law.
Note that I didn’t say anything about contract or copyright law—they may have signed something saying they wouldn’t reverse engineer the chip, or the sale could come with an end user Eula to that effect.
I'm just saying that if RPT tried to write their own firmware, they could be in big legal trouble, so I wouldn't expect any open-source firmware from RPT anytime soon.
It is “heavily protected” only in a legal sense, not a practical one.
1. The decoder blocks, H.264 and H.265, Broadcom/RPT can never release the source code to this without violating potentially thousands of patents worldwide.
2. The GPU of the Pi runs a ThreadX RTOS, which is licensed, runs on "billions" of devices worldwide, and can never be open-source without being sued for, well, huge amounts of damages. (The GPU blobs will never be open for this reason, but perhaps a mostly-complete GPU firmware NOT based on ThreadX will be released someday by the community, but I wouldn't hold my breath).
Also, you know the Pi's new OpenGL driver? All it does is convert the OpenGL commands and stuff into commands for this proprietary ThreadX GPU software.
3. If you think this isn't great, it's still better than the Pi's competitor boards, which have missing gaps in functionality, proprietary blobs which don't work well or even at all, and open-source implementations that currently just suck. (Read Hackaday's Pine64 Un-Review to see what I mean. It's improved a bit since then, but this is why "Pi-killers" haven't caught on.)
I use Pis as a stateless platform for an application that doesn’t use any graphics, GPU, or codecs. I imagine several other people do too.
You mean the old driver? The new one is based on Mesa.
I do know that The Raspberry Pi has a RTOS for the VideoCore GPU, and it is based on ThreadX RTOS, which is proprietary and used on "billions" of devices. The RPF will never be able to make that OSS.