I've written some bare-metal stuff on the Pi (somewhere I've got a 90% finished port of Fuzix for it), and oh god yes, that's so true. Being able to do complex

I've written some bare-metal stuff on the Pi (somewhere I've got a 90% finished port of Fuzix for it), and oh god yes, that's so true. Being able to do complex stuff like set up a framebuffer by making a simple RPC call to the VC4, passing in a pointer and a descriptor block saying 'this big, please', is so much better than having to do it yourself. But this firmware doesn't contain code to initialise the GPU, it does contain initialisation code for one rather important peripheral, which is the DRAM. The VC4 has been pretty well reverse engineered for a while (I did one of the early C compiler ports for it), but the big missing piece was figuring out how to initialise the RAM. Without that, everything had to fit in the 128kB of built-in SRAM. This firmware's a huge step forward.