Open Source ARM userland
raspberrypi.org
raspberrypi.org
I write software for ARM system on chips for living so I was naturally interested in what would a competitor's software stack look like. And I was very skeptical that they would have actually revealed anything of importance. And, unfortunately, I was right. There's nothing important here (at least in the 3d part).
The OpenGL implementation is still somewhere in a binary blob that is not accessible.
The graphics drivers would reveal crucial information about the hardware design and give an advantage to the competitors who can use that information and the software itself to make chips cheaper.
I'm not talking about established competitors in the high end market but the anonymous small chip companies that do chips for the $100 Android tablets you can get from Asia.
Note: I would really like that everyone in the SoC business would open source everything they had and and the competition would be about who designs and manufactures the badassest silicon chips. But that's just not the way it works and I can't do anything about it.
The OpenGL ES implementation is accessible via the interface. The VideoCore firmware has not been open sourced and that claim hasn't been made.
It's fascinating to see people who would seem to be aligned with the RPi's goals getting hostile toward the RPi Foundation. Why is this? My (probably wrong) guess on the psychology at work is that it is not the lack of much forward progress in this project (unquestionably, they have made _some_ forward progress by making the RPi, regardless of whether it is "enough"), but it is the idea of "stealing someone else's fire". It threatens people whose devoted purpose is to fight for what they perceive as the impossible: a totally open device or those whose mission it is only to complain about the lack of openness in devices (cf. actually willing to make sacrafices to use an open device). It steals their fire. The more open things become, even if only a little more open, the less they have to fight for or complain about. Their devoted purpose starts to deflate. It's less important.
And I would guess there are also those who just can't stand to see any sort of change. When the "impossible" starts to seem eventually possible, it's disorienting for them.
My understanding of this announcement is that it's directed at people who are trying to port other OS's to the RPi. Having this code makes their work easier. What if I do not use Linux much? What if I am not insistent on using my computer only as a TV set or a game console? What if my usage is text-based? What if I just want to run another OS on the Pi? Would I consider making this userland code available a definite step forward?
The purpose of open source isn't always to learn. Sometimes the purpose is just to make your computer work.
(It's interesting that hackers were opposed to softmodems and such for many years but now people are taking the opposite stance in this thread.)
http://airlied.livejournal.com/76383.html
"really what they've released is totally useless to anyone who uses or develops this stuff."
Hopefully this is the start of a trend.
Binary drivers or binary GPU firmware? If the latter then Pi is in much the same place. (I would watch the video but am at work...)
Now, as I've said before, if the RPi gets solid USB host and isochronous transfer support (for e.g. Kinect, USB audio devices), then it will be unbeatable.
[0] http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=6...
I have a plan to release an Architecture/Programming guide and will be recruiting more hands shortly for tools like LLVM etc. But today let's celebrate the great work the foundation have done opening up the user land!
The RasPi foundation is staying as classy as ever.
That is, answer the question "Would Stallman use this?".
Freedom is not a philosophical reason.
In that sentence, «philosophical reasons», philosophical meant abstract, remote, detached from practical concerns. The freedoms sought by FLOSS people are very much practical (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ) and with many concrete effects on your daily life. Engineering problems (problems with your video driver? Want to update the OS of your 2-year old tablet?) and social problems (ever heard of somebody whose books have been deleted remotely by a FLOSS app?).
I want to argue that, while modern academic philosophy may be a bit of an ivory tower, philosophy in general isn't synonymous with "detached from practical concerns".
I strongly agree with you on this; I did not make my point clear enough. What I do not like is the use that the article's author did of the term "philosophical". I do not think that philosophy is synonymous with "detached from practical concerns" but it feels like the author of the article do:
> Aside from being exciting to FOSS enthusiasts for philosophical reasons, it’s also going to make it much easier for third party developers to (for instance) implement Wayland EGL client and EGL server support, or to provide better integration of GLES/VG with X.Org.
To me it reads like "Aside finally shouting the mouth of these FOSS do-gooders, this change has practical positive implications". As if the people pushing the FOSS philosophy where not doing that because of their interest in practical (long term) benefits.
Has some more details.
Asking for 'the blob' is akin to asking for the firmware source to a hard disk. Even if you had it you could not do much with it.
What are you going to do with it? Who knows, we don't know what the capabilities are. I also have an instinctive dislike of the odd GPU-driven boot process where something open and hackable like u-boot could have been used.
Asking for 'the blob' is akin to asking for the firmware source to a hard disk. Even if you had it you could not do much with it.
Play. Is that not enough? I'd love to experiment with hard drive firmware, toy with different caching algorithms, learn about the algorithms that convert between the analog signals at the heads and the data sent to the host, etc.
The Alphamosaic processor (branded VideoCore in its Broadcom incarnation) has also been marketed as a network and security accelerator in its previous life... It might well be useful for all kinds of stuff.
The userland part is the implementation of hardware accelerated OpenGL ES 2 and OpenMAX (video acceleration), at least.
Now, I guess NVidia could put a high-powered processor on their GPUs and move their entire OpenGL driver stack onto it as "firmware" so that they could claim their drivers were open source, but that doesn't seem like something they'd do.
And sure, having the userspace and kernel driver open source is only a start. But having everything that runs on the CPU open source is great from a separation-of-concerns perspective.
Open sourcing the firmware and even the hardware itself would be cool, but is a battle for another day... And that'd no more be a matter of the just the GPU, but of all hardware that has firmware, including the CPU, network equipment, 3G radios...
What a fantastic amount of work that this must've required.
My hope is that it would at least get ARM to open up more of the Mali stuff, but based on my interpretation (and experience) there is nothing extremely special between this announcement and every other ARM board. The meaty GPU bits that are the really fun and interesting bit are still locked away in a firmware blob.
A $350 video card would have upwards of 2000 shaders and would run at a much higher clock-speed. It's simply orders of magnitude faster at a price that's only one order of magnitude higher.
From what hermanhermitage said above, I'd guess no. You've now got full access to the OpenGL API, but you don't have full access to the hardware running the binary blob which is what is running the OpenGL code.