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Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial imp

Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. What they should do is to leverage their position in the market and convince Broadcom to open source the bootloader and drivers. There are a bunch of binary blobs from Broadcom that are a mystery as to what they do. No docs, no anything. HAL layer is completely at the mercy of Raspbery Pi. Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing. If you want to support proper open source development (I understand, at some point things get proprietary the closer you get to the hardware, but with RPi, there isn't even a datasheet for the processor that you can get your hands on), buy Beagle board and other alternatives.

stevefan1999 6y ago
Agreed. Thoe closed-source blobs and lack of docs also made it hard for WoA folks to write proper drivers for RPi4. I remember they had this beyond 3GB PCIE memory corruption issue for quite a long which is only recently fixed. I hope they can reverse engineer the GPU tho, it is nightmarish.
colordrops 6y ago
> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. Even if the chip designs and drivers were open source, you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves. Unless amateurs could build one from scratch you will never be satisfied.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong and it is open source at the app layer but it's not like Raspberry Pi is a purely software product. They're a hardware company, acting like a maker friendly, open source device - similar to Arduino (which btw is totally open source, even the bootloader and you can get data sheets for every single component on it), but it falls short with only the top app layer being open source. The middle layer (HAL, drivers, etc.) is all closed source. And hardware is closed source. It's ok to be closed source IMO, but they should not be marketing themselves like Arduino folks.
  - benn_88 6y ago
    Arduino is a for-profit company with open source hardware; Raspberry Pi is a charity with closed-source hardware. Nothing wrong with either approach. But your comment makes out they're a for-profit company with closed-source hardware acting like the good guys. Not sure it's fair to label them as just another company when they're not-for-profit and pump all their money into a) product development and b) education programmes. To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding. As opposed to now, when people buy such totally-not-clones as the Banana Pi and Orange Pi? For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.
      - winfred 6y ago
        >For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones. The clones are fine for simple stuff. But they really cut every corner possible, so even the chip is counterfeit, which means it doesn't behave like a real Arduino does. Deep sleep will use 1000x as much current on some clones compared to a real Arduino, for example. You really can't only use clones. You have to develop/test on real Arduino hardware, then deploy to clones. Because the clones aren't reliable in their behavior.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      The thing helping the Raspberry Pi fend off clones is their deal with Broadcom, not whether the board, firmware, and boot code are open or closed source. It's easy to copy the board and binary blobs either way. The closed nature of the boot code hurts tinkering without helping sales.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Furthermore, right now there the open alternatives for Broadcomm's chips just aren't nearly as good (at this price-performance point). They made a compromise.
- rektide 6y ago
  > It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. I'm not down with this injection of skepticism. This is slipperly language trying to make a pretty clearly contrasted situation murky. Sure, if you just need something to process instructions, maybe the well-defined cpu architecture is enough. But kernels need things like timers to run. They need USB hosts to attach keyboards & mice. They need GPUs to out things to screen. They need power management to not run hot. They need SD(-card) io to access storage. Yes, you can run any code on an RPi, that is some definition of open. But it should be obvious that for this to be useful & prevalent, a lot more is required, and those layers being locked away, in proprietary systems, that we have to keep reverse-engineering usage of, is a huge detractor from civilization & it's functioning. > you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves > Unless amateurs could build one from scratch you will never be satisfied. I was not expecting slippery slope to descend quite so quickly! But perhaps you are right! There is a lot of interest in open source chipmaking these days, and hopefully we indeed do start to see a re-opening of the foundries that lead to such growth & science in the 80's, that created so much progress. Companies like Oracle & IBM certainly seem to have similar desires, to insure that we can satisfy ourselves & learn & grow, first with OpenSPARC in 2005, and OpenPOWER in 2013 certainly indicate that some very big entities in the world see & understand the value of open, through and through. More recently, works like RISC-V & OpenROAD show architectures & processes are once again coming back into focus as a thing that people see the value in opening, in being able to work together in. Google is doing free chip fabrication runs to try to help re-grow this once proud & mighty but clearly ossifying sector that has undergone a massive wave of buy-outs & consolidation. Because we have to keep the knowledge & know-how alive & growing. Because people should be making chips. And too few are these days. That all said, I think there's a pretty clear cut difference between what you are posting about "proprietary processes and supply chains" versus situations like what we have here, where Broadcom makes chips, then conceals & makes it difficult for anyone but a couple chosen embedded partners to understand or use those chips. It's a bit frustrating that Broadcom continues to use their own proprietary peripherals they've adapted over the decades versus using more off-the-shelf standard-operating peripherals. But it's not necessarily the proprietary bit that makes this so sticky: it's the overarchingly user-hostile attitude of this behemoth, the lengths they seemingly go through to keep amateurs out & away, in contrast to other companies that if not directly support at least don't obstruct upstreaming & open source driver development. I look at the wifi-router world, & Broadcom routers are basically get-what-you-buy now, no ability to customize or change OS. Broadcom used to allow alternate OSes, but since 802.11ac, they have more or less cut off access. This was always proprietary, but at least it was something we could learn about, interface with, but now, it is locked down.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  As a long-time rPi user and embedded developer, it’s really not about ideological purity (or at least not entirely). There are real ramifications for the lack of open documentation for the GPU interfaces on the Raspberry Pi that make it really hard to use (as in utilize) if not running a mainstream Linux w/ binary blobs and device overlays. The GPU even does the system startup and initial boot loading; it’s not just closed source, it’s also entirely opaque and undocumented (documentation only available for bulk purchasers from Broadcom and under NDA, purchasing Raspberry Pi in bulk doesn’t get you the SoC documentation). (Unlike typical devices, the CPU doesn’t do system startup and initialize the GPU as an add-on or co-processor, on the Raspberry Pi the situation is more or less reversed.)
- zoobab 6y ago
  The first binary blob you boot on a Pi is based on ThreadX, a proprietary OS now bought by Microsoft. And this binary blob fucks up the thermal control as well.
rektide 6y ago
Largely agreed. There's been some very dedicated people open sourcing support for RPi pieces, which is amazing to see, but it's been herculean efforts over many years with seemingly no support. This is unfortunate & sad, but at least things have been moving forward. The much sadder story is wifi routers. OpenWRT used to have pretty broad support for a wide range of routers, but there have been less & less people making chipsets, and now you're probably getting either Broadcom or Qualcomm/Atheros. Broadcom has never been a "good" player in this space, but since 802.11ac routers started showing up over half a decade ago, the community has been unable to get a foothold in on Broadcom routers (I'm not sure if we have access to the bootloaders that we need, and I'm rather confident that we don't have access to open or closed drivers that we can use to run these Broadcom wifi routers). It's frankly scary how controlled & inflexible the wifi router world is. This is further compounded by a general un-availability of add-on wifi cards: even though these chips are just PCIe devices, there's incredibly poor availability of things like PCIe cards & m.2 and mpcie cards one might add to a regular PC to make one's own wifi-router. This is all to say, watching Broadcom has been really a scary, horrifying company to watch. The consumerization- the exclusion of the enthusiast & maker- has been very clear with Broadcom in specific, amid a market that's already shaky & at risk. The rich geeks keep fleeing to enterprise gear, the consumer keeps getting more and more stratified tiers of expensive consumer devices, and the ability to run our own networks keeps seemingly vanishing. And Broadcom is a colossus of a company that has obstructed & prevented the kind of healthy, resilient, community-powered growth that has lead to so much progress in every other sector of computing. Leaving wifi-router discussion, I'm really hoping we start seeing more Broadcom SoC competitors show up with good offering, more single-board-computer offerings. Amlogic is doing very well with keeping upstream support, their S905X3 is a very nice chip. But the Cortex A55 core is not as powerful as the Broadcom's A73's, & there's not the dual-video out. Folks like MediaTek and Qualcomm have lots of good offerings, but no presence in the maker world. NXP does a pretty good job supporting makers, but usually at a high price point for somewhat aged cores. If you do want to investigate alternatives to RPi, this comparison of the Broadcom-based RPi4 vs an Amlogic S905X3 Odroid-C4 is a decent starting point: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/24/raspberry-pi-4-vs-odroid-c4-features-comparison/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/24/raspberry-pi-4-vs-od...
- 6y ago
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing. In a world increasingly more virtualized, multilayered, and interconnected, how would you ensure "purity" in that regard? And can you?
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I think if they had the following done right, it would be pretty much on par with open source hardware/software expectations: 1. Hardware datasheets for all components 2. Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source. I understand bootloader can be proprietary tech and they can use non-commercial compete license but allow people to hack them and at the very least view it. 3. All PCB and gerber files available. Clean schematic documentation. 4. HAL/Middleware - this is by far the most crucial portion. The user should be able to write drivers for anything. Right now, if I want to connect a VR 2048x2048 LCD (3.5" square) with a DSI/MIPI interface, I cannot write a driver for this with RPi. It's not entirely their problem either - the DSI org gatekeeps the datasheet and development for it unless you fork out a generate multi thousand dollar membership. That's all. Obviously they cannot compel each component manufacturer to open source their silicon... at some point the expectation fades.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    > 2. Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source. I understand bootloader can be proprietary tech and they can use non-commercial compete license but allow people to hack them and at the very least view it. This is a bit of a nitpick, but assuming point one of your post, tbh as an embedded developer there’s nothing magical or worth protecting in a bootloader. It’s such boring and, in the case of embedded systems on a chip, specialized code that really has no commercial value if the hardware documentation is available except in letting you gatekeep what runs on your chip. As in, anyone with the datasheets can write a bootloader and the bootloader provides no value to someone that has their own (proprietary or knockoff) SoC. All that is to say, the Broadcom bootloader is closed for the same reason the datasheets and documentation are: it’s to prevent revealing the internals of the chip for fear of making it easier to reverse engineer or clone.
scottlamb 6y ago
> If you want to support proper open source development ... buy Beagle board and other alternatives. What more open alternatives are there with similar price and performance? The Beagleboards are ridiculously underpowered compared to a Raspberry Pi 4. I like the ODROIDs but I don't think they're any more open than Raspberry Pi. They also tend to be more expensive. YMMV on all of this stuff: * Some folks are doing microcontroller-esque things and care about openness more than performance. * For my applications, I need the performance. The sort of open hardware, no blob stuff you're talking about would be great on principle but I may or may not take advantage of it. I'm still able to run and develop open-source Linux userspace apps without it.
- rektide 6y ago
  Odroid series come with a wide variety of chips. The Amlogic S905X3 has good upstream support (largely via a very active volunteer community) & is on their Odroid-C4. If performance is your top concern, you should stick with x86. There's no ARM gear with anywhere near the bang/$ of an Odroid H2+, which is an rpi-like $120 x86 single-board system. It is fantastically well supported by the cpu vendor.
  - scottlamb 6y ago
    The ODROID H2+ is perfect for one of my applications, with the extra CPU power, second NIC, included real-time clock, onboard SATA and an official case option that fits 2 3.5" drives, and onboard eMMC socket. $120 [edit: plus RAM cost] rather than $35 is a whole other price category though.
    - ausjke 6y ago
      at that price range why not just go all the way to mini-itx, when you hook SATA etc you will need a larger case with some cooling space inside, mini-itx seems to be a much more practical option then, a quick search found https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813157930 https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813157930 there are many to choose from actually. or just nano-itx, both are easier to get cases and power supplies etc.
grahamm 6y ago
I think people forget what it was designed for. It was to reboot IT education which was (is) badly floundering. It's success was so good it started to be used in small commercial applications. The Foundation tried to help fill this gap in the market with the compute module. Even though there is a lot of open source features the use of the Broadcom chipset was probably driven by cost as keeping the Pi price down was a factor. If a fully open source and open document solution is required perhaps the Pi isn't the right choice but then that was never it's original goal.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  No doubt, RPi has been a boon to the world and the popularity speaks for itself.
- paulmd 6y ago
  I can't imagine having to sysadmin a bunch of raspberry pis in a serious "production" setting with all the reliability problems they have, that would be godawful, you'd go through a brace of SD cards every month
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's not the rpi's fault on the failures, it's the cheap ass SD cards that people buy.
    - pishpash 6y ago
      It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.
secondcoming 6y ago
Anything capable of playing HD content is going to have a binary blob. The Pi (at least the first version of it) used the same chipset that was in the Nokia N8. Even Nokia got given those blobs.
- stragies 6y ago
  I also thought that, but then somebody here mentioned (in another topic), that the RK3388 from Rockchip runs entirely blobless. I'm having trouble digging up that post, but i'm sure I did not dream it. I'm hoping that statement applies to other members of the Rockchip family too.
salawat 6y ago
By datasheet, do you mean the equivalent of a document detailing all the innards and details of the IC's down to the Opcodes/datapath? Because I've gotten basically down to apparently what you're to write drivers for OSes with, and I know there is the annoying "teehee, let's implement OpenGL calls in firmware so the open source software is a stupid passthrough interface to the IC" which is understandably frustrating given I'd hoped to use my Pi to finally get around to driving graphics hardware to do something useful I can grok, but it's far from documentationless unless I'm missing something fundamental.
syntheticnature 6y ago
"Position in the market"? Broadcom makes STB chips that trivially dwarf all the shipped Pis. Heck, the first Pi was based on a bunch of chips from an aborted project. The RPi folks are, unfortunately, lucky that Broadcom even gives them the time of day. Not that I disagree with your overall statement -- certainly I've found myself explaining to folks in a commercial setting that while Raspberry Pi might be a great way to a quick prototype, you're going to need to reimplement against some other hardware. Really what you're getting with the R-Pi is the community that goes with it, who have so far been very loyal to that series of devices.
pabs3 6y ago
There is libre RPi boot firmware, unfortunately it relies on toolchain support that isn't upstream yet: https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7 https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7
tenantless 6y ago
> We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. I think you misspelled prototype.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  I think there are probably plenty of commercial devices for which the raspberry pi compute module makes perfect sense. Think about things like PoS terminals, information kiosks, digital signage. Why would you bother making your own hardware for those when a raspberry pi is exactly what you want and way cheaper.
menybuvico 6y ago
It's made for tinkering and learning. It's used for a lot more due to it being so easily replaceable. After all, I don't care if there are binary blobs from a trusted vendor for the device playing retro video games -- the TV is bound to have more spyware anyway...
iExploder 6y ago
great point, especially since now they try to sell the "compute module" variants which are aimed at commercial use, having to use a blackbox bootloader is wtf and I dont think many companies will accept that
m4rtink 6y ago
Not just all that, but also hardware DRM (!!) on the camera module interface: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1088472549715918848?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/10884725497159188...
- kingosticks 6y ago
  And the rebuttal: https://twitter.com/EbenUpton/status/1088440503622909952?s=20 https://twitter.com/EbenUpton/status/1088440503622909952?s=2... The outrage and entitlement in the original tweet is laughable. It's an education charity, they need to raise money to fund their cause and do their work. I'm glad they do stuff like this. I bought both versions of the camera.
ruinevil 6y ago
Eben Upton was a Broadcom engineer and executive. He basically used his contacts there to setup Raspberry Pi, and the relationship has continued ever since.

stevefan1999 6y ago

Agreed. Thoe closed-source blobs and lack of docs also made it hard for WoA folks to write proper drivers for RPi4. I remember they had this beyond 3GB PCIE memory corruption issue for quite a long which is only recently fixed. I hope they can reverse engineer the GPU tho, it is nightmarish.

colordrops 6y ago

> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. Even if the chip designs and drivers were open source, you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves. Unless amateurs could build one from scratch you will never be satisfied.

systemvoltage 6y ago
I mean, you're not wrong and it is open source at the app layer but it's not like Raspberry Pi is a purely software product. They're a hardware company, acting like a maker friendly, open source device - similar to Arduino (which btw is totally open source, even the bootloader and you can get data sheets for every single component on it), but it falls short with only the top app layer being open source. The middle layer (HAL, drivers, etc.) is all closed source. And hardware is closed source. It's ok to be closed source IMO, but they should not be marketing themselves like Arduino folks.
- benn_88 6y ago
  Arduino is a for-profit company with open source hardware; Raspberry Pi is a charity with closed-source hardware. Nothing wrong with either approach. But your comment makes out they're a for-profit company with closed-source hardware acting like the good guys. Not sure it's fair to label them as just another company when they're not-for-profit and pump all their money into a) product development and b) education programmes. To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding. As opposed to now, when people buy such totally-not-clones as the Banana Pi and Orange Pi? For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.
    - winfred 6y ago
      >For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones. The clones are fine for simple stuff. But they really cut every corner possible, so even the chip is counterfeit, which means it doesn't behave like a real Arduino does. Deep sleep will use 1000x as much current on some clones compared to a real Arduino, for example. You really can't only use clones. You have to develop/test on real Arduino hardware, then deploy to clones. Because the clones aren't reliable in their behavior.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    The thing helping the Raspberry Pi fend off clones is their deal with Broadcom, not whether the board, firmware, and boot code are open or closed source. It's easy to copy the board and binary blobs either way. The closed nature of the boot code hurts tinkering without helping sales.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Furthermore, right now there the open alternatives for Broadcomm's chips just aren't nearly as good (at this price-performance point). They made a compromise.
rektide 6y ago
> It depends on what layer you care about. At the application layer it is completely open. I'm not down with this injection of skepticism. This is slipperly language trying to make a pretty clearly contrasted situation murky. Sure, if you just need something to process instructions, maybe the well-defined cpu architecture is enough. But kernels need things like timers to run. They need USB hosts to attach keyboards & mice. They need GPUs to out things to screen. They need power management to not run hot. They need SD(-card) io to access storage. Yes, you can run any code on an RPi, that is some definition of open. But it should be obvious that for this to be useful & prevalent, a lot more is required, and those layers being locked away, in proprietary systems, that we have to keep reverse-engineering usage of, is a huge detractor from civilization & it's functioning. > you could claim that there are proprietary processes and supply chains for the hardware and material themselves > Unless amateurs could build one from scratch you will never be satisfied. I was not expecting slippery slope to descend quite so quickly! But perhaps you are right! There is a lot of interest in open source chipmaking these days, and hopefully we indeed do start to see a re-opening of the foundries that lead to such growth & science in the 80's, that created so much progress. Companies like Oracle & IBM certainly seem to have similar desires, to insure that we can satisfy ourselves & learn & grow, first with OpenSPARC in 2005, and OpenPOWER in 2013 certainly indicate that some very big entities in the world see & understand the value of open, through and through. More recently, works like RISC-V & OpenROAD show architectures & processes are once again coming back into focus as a thing that people see the value in opening, in being able to work together in. Google is doing free chip fabrication runs to try to help re-grow this once proud & mighty but clearly ossifying sector that has undergone a massive wave of buy-outs & consolidation. Because we have to keep the knowledge & know-how alive & growing. Because people should be making chips. And too few are these days. That all said, I think there's a pretty clear cut difference between what you are posting about "proprietary processes and supply chains" versus situations like what we have here, where Broadcom makes chips, then conceals & makes it difficult for anyone but a couple chosen embedded partners to understand or use those chips. It's a bit frustrating that Broadcom continues to use their own proprietary peripherals they've adapted over the decades versus using more off-the-shelf standard-operating peripherals. But it's not necessarily the proprietary bit that makes this so sticky: it's the overarchingly user-hostile attitude of this behemoth, the lengths they seemingly go through to keep amateurs out & away, in contrast to other companies that if not directly support at least don't obstruct upstreaming & open source driver development. I look at the wifi-router world, & Broadcom routers are basically get-what-you-buy now, no ability to customize or change OS. Broadcom used to allow alternate OSes, but since 802.11ac, they have more or less cut off access. This was always proprietary, but at least it was something we could learn about, interface with, but now, it is locked down.
ComputerGuru 6y ago
As a long-time rPi user and embedded developer, it’s really not about ideological purity (or at least not entirely). There are real ramifications for the lack of open documentation for the GPU interfaces on the Raspberry Pi that make it really hard to use (as in utilize) if not running a mainstream Linux w/ binary blobs and device overlays. The GPU even does the system startup and initial boot loading; it’s not just closed source, it’s also entirely opaque and undocumented (documentation only available for bulk purchasers from Broadcom and under NDA, purchasing Raspberry Pi in bulk doesn’t get you the SoC documentation). (Unlike typical devices, the CPU doesn’t do system startup and initialize the GPU as an add-on or co-processor, on the Raspberry Pi the situation is more or less reversed.)
zoobab 6y ago
The first binary blob you boot on a Pi is based on ThreadX, a proprietary OS now bought by Microsoft. And this binary blob fucks up the thermal control as well.

rektide 6y ago

Largely agreed. There's been some very dedicated people open sourcing support for RPi pieces, which is amazing to see, but it's been herculean efforts over many years with seemingly no support. This is unfortunate & sad, but at least things have been moving forward. The much sadder story is wifi routers. OpenWRT used to have pretty broad support for a wide range of routers, but there have been less & less people making chipsets, and now you're probably getting either Broadcom or Qualcomm/Atheros. Broadcom has never been a "good" player in this space, but since 802.11ac routers started showing up over half a decade ago, the community has been unable to get a foothold in on Broadcom routers (I'm not sure if we have access to the bootloaders that we need, and I'm rather confident that we don't have access to open or closed drivers that we can use to run these Broadcom wifi routers). It's frankly scary how controlled & inflexible the wifi router world is. This is further compounded by a general un-availability of add-on wifi cards: even though these chips are just PCIe devices, there's incredibly poor availability of things like PCIe cards & m.2 and mpcie cards one might add to a regular PC to make one's own wifi-router. This is all to say, watching Broadcom has been really a scary, horrifying company to watch. The consumerization- the exclusion of the enthusiast & maker- has been very clear with Broadcom in specific, amid a market that's already shaky & at risk. The rich geeks keep fleeing to enterprise gear, the consumer keeps getting more and more stratified tiers of expensive consumer devices, and the ability to run our own networks keeps seemingly vanishing. And Broadcom is a colossus of a company that has obstructed & prevented the kind of healthy, resilient, community-powered growth that has lead to so much progress in every other sector of computing. Leaving wifi-router discussion, I'm really hoping we start seeing more Broadcom SoC competitors show up with good offering, more single-board-computer offerings. Amlogic is doing very well with keeping upstream support, their S905X3 is a very nice chip. But the Cortex A55 core is not as powerful as the Broadcom's A73's, & there's not the dual-video out. Folks like MediaTek and Qualcomm have lots of good offerings, but no presence in the maker world. NXP does a pretty good job supporting makers, but usually at a high price point for somewhat aged cores. If you do want to investigate alternatives to RPi, this comparison of the Broadcom-based RPi4 vs an Amlogic S905X3 Odroid-C4 is a decent starting point: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/24/raspberry-pi-4-vs-odroid-c4-features-comparison/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/24/raspberry-pi-4-vs-od...

6y ago

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

> Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing. In a world increasingly more virtualized, multilayered, and interconnected, how would you ensure "purity" in that regard? And can you?

systemvoltage 6y ago
I think if they had the following done right, it would be pretty much on par with open source hardware/software expectations: 1. Hardware datasheets for all components 2. Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source. I understand bootloader can be proprietary tech and they can use non-commercial compete license but allow people to hack them and at the very least view it. 3. All PCB and gerber files available. Clean schematic documentation. 4. HAL/Middleware - this is by far the most crucial portion. The user should be able to write drivers for anything. Right now, if I want to connect a VR 2048x2048 LCD (3.5" square) with a DSI/MIPI interface, I cannot write a driver for this with RPi. It's not entirely their problem either - the DSI org gatekeeps the datasheet and development for it unless you fork out a generate multi thousand dollar membership. That's all. Obviously they cannot compel each component manufacturer to open source their silicon... at some point the expectation fades.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  > 2. Bootloader available to view the source for, if not completely open source. I understand bootloader can be proprietary tech and they can use non-commercial compete license but allow people to hack them and at the very least view it. This is a bit of a nitpick, but assuming point one of your post, tbh as an embedded developer there’s nothing magical or worth protecting in a bootloader. It’s such boring and, in the case of embedded systems on a chip, specialized code that really has no commercial value if the hardware documentation is available except in letting you gatekeep what runs on your chip. As in, anyone with the datasheets can write a bootloader and the bootloader provides no value to someone that has their own (proprietary or knockoff) SoC. All that is to say, the Broadcom bootloader is closed for the same reason the datasheets and documentation are: it’s to prevent revealing the internals of the chip for fear of making it easier to reverse engineer or clone.

scottlamb 6y ago

> If you want to support proper open source development ... buy Beagle board and other alternatives. What more open alternatives are there with similar price and performance? The Beagleboards are ridiculously underpowered compared to a Raspberry Pi 4. I like the ODROIDs but I don't think they're any more open than Raspberry Pi. They also tend to be more expensive. YMMV on all of this stuff: * Some folks are doing microcontroller-esque things and care about openness more than performance. * For my applications, I need the performance. The sort of open hardware, no blob stuff you're talking about would be great on principle but I may or may not take advantage of it. I'm still able to run and develop open-source Linux userspace apps without it.

rektide 6y ago
Odroid series come with a wide variety of chips. The Amlogic S905X3 has good upstream support (largely via a very active volunteer community) & is on their Odroid-C4. If performance is your top concern, you should stick with x86. There's no ARM gear with anywhere near the bang/$ of an Odroid H2+, which is an rpi-like $120 x86 single-board system. It is fantastically well supported by the cpu vendor.
- scottlamb 6y ago
  The ODROID H2+ is perfect for one of my applications, with the extra CPU power, second NIC, included real-time clock, onboard SATA and an official case option that fits 2 3.5" drives, and onboard eMMC socket. $120 [edit: plus RAM cost] rather than $35 is a whole other price category though.
  - ausjke 6y ago
    at that price range why not just go all the way to mini-itx, when you hook SATA etc you will need a larger case with some cooling space inside, mini-itx seems to be a much more practical option then, a quick search found https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813157930 https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813157930 there are many to choose from actually. or just nano-itx, both are easier to get cases and power supplies etc.

grahamm 6y ago

I think people forget what it was designed for. It was to reboot IT education which was (is) badly floundering. It's success was so good it started to be used in small commercial applications. The Foundation tried to help fill this gap in the market with the compute module. Even though there is a lot of open source features the use of the Broadcom chipset was probably driven by cost as keeping the Pi price down was a factor. If a fully open source and open document solution is required perhaps the Pi isn't the right choice but then that was never it's original goal.

systemvoltage 6y ago
No doubt, RPi has been a boon to the world and the popularity speaks for itself.
paulmd 6y ago
I can't imagine having to sysadmin a bunch of raspberry pis in a serious "production" setting with all the reliability problems they have, that would be godawful, you'd go through a brace of SD cards every month
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Why? I supported 40 of them (rpi 3) as remote serial hosts and custom reboot/repower for a QA farm. Not a single one failed and don't think I had a single issue during that whole time. As far as I know it's still going just fine. It was a cheap and dependable solution. 99% of the SD card issues go away when you don't cheap out and don't go cheap. get a large card that is 32GB plus from a respectable vendor. That's not the rpi's fault on the failures, it's the cheap ass SD cards that people buy.
  - pishpash 6y ago
    It is the fault of Pi hardware when it still refuses to provide a hardware shutdown button for proper file system unmounts, after all these years.

secondcoming 6y ago

Anything capable of playing HD content is going to have a binary blob. The Pi (at least the first version of it) used the same chipset that was in the Nokia N8. Even Nokia got given those blobs.

stragies 6y ago
I also thought that, but then somebody here mentioned (in another topic), that the RK3388 from Rockchip runs entirely blobless. I'm having trouble digging up that post, but i'm sure I did not dream it. I'm hoping that statement applies to other members of the Rockchip family too.

salawat 6y ago

By datasheet, do you mean the equivalent of a document detailing all the innards and details of the IC's down to the Opcodes/datapath? Because I've gotten basically down to apparently what you're to write drivers for OSes with, and I know there is the annoying "teehee, let's implement OpenGL calls in firmware so the open source software is a stupid passthrough interface to the IC" which is understandably frustrating given I'd hoped to use my Pi to finally get around to driving graphics hardware to do something useful I can grok, but it's far from documentationless unless I'm missing something fundamental.

syntheticnature 6y ago

"Position in the market"? Broadcom makes STB chips that trivially dwarf all the shipped Pis. Heck, the first Pi was based on a bunch of chips from an aborted project. The RPi folks are, unfortunately, lucky that Broadcom even gives them the time of day. Not that I disagree with your overall statement -- certainly I've found myself explaining to folks in a commercial setting that while Raspberry Pi might be a great way to a quick prototype, you're going to need to reimplement against some other hardware. Really what you're getting with the R-Pi is the community that goes with it, who have so far been very loyal to that series of devices.

pabs3 6y ago

There is libre RPi boot firmware, unfortunately it relies on toolchain support that isn't upstream yet: https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7 https://github.com/itszor/vc4-toolchain/issues/7

tenantless 6y ago

> We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature. I think you misspelled prototype.

IshKebab 6y ago
I think there are probably plenty of commercial devices for which the raspberry pi compute module makes perfect sense. Think about things like PoS terminals, information kiosks, digital signage. Why would you bother making your own hardware for those when a raspberry pi is exactly what you want and way cheaper.

menybuvico 6y ago

It's made for tinkering and learning. It's used for a lot more due to it being so easily replaceable. After all, I don't care if there are binary blobs from a trusted vendor for the device playing retro video games -- the TV is bound to have more spyware anyway...

iExploder 6y ago

great point, especially since now they try to sell the "compute module" variants which are aimed at commercial use, having to use a blackbox bootloader is wtf and I dont think many companies will accept that

m4rtink 6y ago

Not just all that, but also hardware DRM (!!) on the camera module interface: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1088472549715918848?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/10884725497159188...

kingosticks 6y ago
And the rebuttal: https://twitter.com/EbenUpton/status/1088440503622909952?s=20 https://twitter.com/EbenUpton/status/1088440503622909952?s=2... The outrage and entitlement in the original tweet is laughable. It's an education charity, they need to raise money to fund their cause and do their work. I'm glad they do stuff like this. I bought both versions of the camera.

ruinevil 6y ago

Eben Upton was a Broadcom engineer and executive. He basically used his contacts there to setup Raspberry Pi, and the relationship has continued ever since.