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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

By the entire industry. There simply doesn't exist a chip that does the things a raspberry pi needs, that is free of proprietary software.

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Not true at all. Pinephone runs on a SoC with no binary blobs user has to install.

And the SoC can do all the stuff my Rpi 2b does, and more (has a proper audio codec, for one, real gigabit ethernet, working suspend to ram, etc.), does suspend to ram, accelerated video decoding, and has much more open documentation... Rpi 2b's soc is pretty terrible usability wise comapred to A64.

It is actually the other way around since a lot of other boards use no proprietary blobs, either out of the box or can be easily adapted to do that. The RPi Foundation are without doubt good at making hardware, but they're even better at letting users believe they're the only player in that field.

If running without blobs is your priority, various Allwinner or Rockchip SoCs would be much better choice. (they run with upstream kernel, and aren't GPU with ARM core added as an afterthought)

RISC-V is probably the closest, but they're going to need to get faster to compete with ARM.

As it's the GPU that seems to be the issue here is there a RISC-V based SoC with an open source GPU driver?

Worth noting too that there is an open source driver for Arm's own Mali GPUs.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2021/06/11/open...

The GPU is not the issue. There are open source OpenGL ES drivers available in upstream Mesa right now, that work with upstream kernel DRM driver, and for RPi4 users there's even a Vulkan driver.

It's been pointed out elsewhere but briefly there is a VLIW processor (the "VPU") that is initially in charge of the entire boot sequence before handing off control to the main ARM cores; the bootcode.bin firmware for RPi devices is exactly this code. This includes things like bringing up PLLs and the on-board UART before handing off control to the ARM core where "userspace" code runs.

There are many free RISC-V implementations, and several free GPU drivers for various hardware families, but there is no combination of the two in any meaningful sense right now. If I had to guess I'd say ImgTec is probably one of the ones you could expect to pop up in an SoC somewhere, since I doubt ARM or Qualcomm are going to license their GPUs outside their families... ImgTec recently started contributing some code to Mesa but otherwise have historically been pretty hostile. So the immediate speculation doesn't look great at the moment but who knows what could happen.

The VPU isn’t a VLIW at all, it’s an interesting RISC.

Arm GPUs are also licensable by anybody, they were x86 phones with them back when those were still a thing.

Interesting, thanks for both the corrections. Curious, but do you know if there anyone still using Mali outside the ARM-licensed family at this point? I guess there haven't been many new entries to the mobile market for so long the GPU pairings seem natural, now...

Isn’t it right that there’s barely any hardware at all out there that can run fully foss?

beaglebone

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