3 ms·
Still doesn't exist, though it's a step in the right direction. Before, the most anyone had managed on the Raspberry Pi without the closed-source bootloader was
by makomk 11y ago
Still doesn't exist, though it's a step in the right direction. Before, the most anyone had managed on the Raspberry Pi without the closed-source bootloader was to run small VPU programs that toggled GPIOs and talked serial; now this can run small ARM programs that do the same. It still needs some way to actually read programs from external storage and a whole bunch of (completely undocumented, IIRC) clock and power management hardware initialization.
Don't get me wrong, it's impressive what the Raspberry Pi community have managed given that just how heavily hamstrung they are here, but don't expect to be running Linux without the blob any time soon. I remember people involved in this talking about having reverse-engineered enough information to boot the ARM core in theory over a year ago. It's slow going.
- christina_b 11y agoActually, the bulk SDRAM/ARM work was done by me in the space of around month (though I only ARM to finally work three days ago with Herman's help). You could run Linux on ARM using this but you would need to write some more drivers, otherwise you'd be limited to pretty much GPIO/serial/SDHOST PIO. SDHOST is actually a fairly trivial interface to implement, I'm going to use it in my chainloader but I haven't had the time to look at it yet.
- pfalcon 11y ago> Actually, the bulk SDRAM/ARM work was done by me in the space of around month Full-time? Rainy weekends? This borders on personal territory of "what do you do for day-job?", so feel free to skip answering.