4 ms·

>and use something actually free, like the BeagleBone. Oh please, while you lose the VC4 firmware, you instead get a proprietary PowerVR GPU with no free drive

>and use something actually free, like the BeagleBone. Oh please, while you lose the VC4 firmware, you instead get a proprietary PowerVR GPU with no free drivers. Not to mention that the Beaglebone has a much worse CPU than the "bolted on ARM" of the RPi. If you're going to dump the rpi for this reason, going to something like the imx6 used in the Cubieboard and Novena would make a lot more sense (edit: Cubox, not Cubieboard).

wolfgke 10y ago
> If you're going to dump the rpi for this reason, going to something like the imx6 used in the Cubieboard and Novena would make a lot more sense. The Cubieboard uses an Allwinner SoC, which has a bad reputation among oppen source people since Allwinner violated the GPL multiple times in the past (though I heard the Linux support is decent; mainly because of the work of the Sunxi community: https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page). Novena (and "Sabre Lite - i.MX6 Quad Core"; cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743798) indeed use a Freescale (now bought by NXP) SoC.
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  Oops, I confused Cubieboard and Cubox, which does have an i.MX6.
monocasa 10y ago
Unfortunately NXP is nuking most of the iMX6 support from orbit after they bought Freescale. Even things like most of the SD card images for their SABRE boards were deleted of their site. It's only due to the large open ecosystem around the iMX6 that we were able to debug some issues while bringing up a board recently.
- webscaleizfun 10y ago
  Same thing happened with Allwinner's SOCs, when the one point of contact that was providing the source of their modified kernel left, Allwinner chipsets stopped getting rapid mainline kernel support. The silver lining though is that the sunxi community has been working to mainline newer chips like the Allwinner H3 & has been doing a bang up job with minimal info, newer kernels can boot up & get most hardware onboard configured & ready to use.

wolfgke 10y ago

> If you're going to dump the rpi for this reason, going to something like the imx6 used in the Cubieboard and Novena would make a lot more sense. The Cubieboard uses an Allwinner SoC, which has a bad reputation among oppen source people since Allwinner violated the GPL multiple times in the past (though I heard the Linux support is decent; mainly because of the work of the Sunxi community: https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page). Novena (and "Sabre Lite - i.MX6 Quad Core"; cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743798) indeed use a Freescale (now bought by NXP) SoC.

TD-Linux 10y ago
Oops, I confused Cubieboard and Cubox, which does have an i.MX6.

monocasa 10y ago

Unfortunately NXP is nuking most of the iMX6 support from orbit after they bought Freescale. Even things like most of the SD card images for their SABRE boards were deleted of their site. It's only due to the large open ecosystem around the iMX6 that we were able to debug some issues while bringing up a board recently.

webscaleizfun 10y ago
Same thing happened with Allwinner's SOCs, when the one point of contact that was providing the source of their modified kernel left, Allwinner chipsets stopped getting rapid mainline kernel support. The silver lining though is that the sunxi community has been working to mainline newer chips like the Allwinner H3 & has been doing a bang up job with minimal info, newer kernels can boot up & get most hardware onboard configured & ready to use.