6 ms·

Come on, you need to at least read the datasheet and errata of the Broadcom SoC. Oh... There isn't one... Unless you're purchasing millions of chips from them a

Come on, you need to at least read the datasheet and errata of the Broadcom SoC. Oh... There isn't one... Unless you're purchasing millions of chips from them and signing an NDA. Seriously, why the hacker community even touches the RPi is beyond me. It is a ridiculously closed product.

jschwartzi 6y ago
Yeah RPi is a great toy but you should treat it like a chemistry set. Use it as a tool for learning but don’t build a product with it. The difference between a $24 board and a $200 board is often the level of support you get. The boards I’ve used in the past all have manuals down to the chip and I won’t touch anything that doesn’t.
- whizzter 6y ago
  And with a 8x smaller price it's perfect for throw-away units. I've heard of people who use it for projects were you place things out in the environment where you really have no control over vandalism, animals,etc so just replacing a cheap unit here or there isn't a big deal.
- detaro 6y ago
  On the other hand, a surprising number of companies decide they don't need that kind of dcoumentation and just ship Pis, and that often works fine too. Not for things with deep hardware integration, and not for mass-scale, but plenty things just want "linux in a box with some simple peripherals".
  - banana_giraffe 6y ago
    As the person tasked with debugging one of those "linux in a box with some simple peripherals", I'm not even 100% convinced they sell them with more than the intent of the consumer turning it on once, playing with for a few minutes, then forgetting it exists.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Oh, not just talking about consumer devices: if anything, I would expect more non-consumer cases (but that could be a wrong estimation)
wlesieutre 6y ago
Because it boots linux and starts at $5
lflux 6y ago
Even then i'm not sure Broadcom would give you that. They're very aware that they're your only source for $chip and will treat you accordingly. (A few employers ago, they were the only source for ethernet PHYs for a carrier-grade network product we were building where we supplied our own MAC)
bee_rider 6y ago
You could buy 30 of them, at least one would be more reliable than the board discussed in the article.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  But which one? :)
- loeg 6y ago
  For 30x price you could buy an overpowered x86 and run QEMU.
h3h3 6y ago
Are you aware of the datasheets published by rpi? https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/datasheets.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
- detaro 6y ago
  Those are very far from complete datasheets, covering only a small part of the SoC superficially.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Yep, the 200 pages you get from there is a bad joke. Even a relatively simple ARM microcontroller (the STM32F1 series) has over a thousand pages of documentation in the reference manual. A full set of reference documentation for a SoC like the BCM2835 would probably come out to 5-10k+ pages.
userbinator 6y ago
It's the "maker" community, who are more than satisfied to glue together half-working things with no real knowledge --- or intent to learn --- about how they work. In fact I'd bet most of them would be scared off by the several thousand pages of documentation an SoC like that usually would have.
- gumby 6y ago
  > It's the "maker" community, who are more than satisfied to glue together half-working things with no real knowledge --- or intent to learn --- about how they work. Is that any different from all that stack overflow copypasta you find all over source code, where the paster clearly had no idea how that code worked? And I’m talking about people who are being paid to ship code. shudder. It’s a wonder anything functions at all these days.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    Can you blame them, though? Not to pick on anyone, but I recently installed a stock storybook setup. Out of curiosity I did a count of all the node_modules (top level + nested). There were >2000 packages installed. Now I know that if I follow the rules of a textbook professional (one that takes security seriously), then I'm obliged to audit all 2000 packages. But between you and the rest of the gazing internet, I don't do this. That's my dirty little secret. I don't give a shit. Gluing orphaned half-assed npm packages together and pretending everything is okay is my job. The ironic part is how many hours we are murdering worrying about TypeScript or unit tests or integration tests and trying very very very hard not to notice that landfill we have placed under our massive rug. There are too many technologies and not enough time to master them. Every time I dive into a popular node package I become more and more worried for the human race. We get things fundamentally wrong and it lives like that. For decades. And people come along and just obliviously use it like that and don't question it. Take something simple, like JWT. Or nonces. Or what people believe and implement around random numbers and how random numbers work (or, often, don't work). Bad information becomes bad code that sits around for a lifetime.
    - 6y ago
tbirdz 6y ago
While the rpi does not have as open a foundation as we would want in an ideal world, it seems like the alternatives are not much better. Do you have any alternative boards that you would recommend to the hacker community?

jschwartzi 6y ago

Yeah RPi is a great toy but you should treat it like a chemistry set. Use it as a tool for learning but don’t build a product with it. The difference between a $24 board and a $200 board is often the level of support you get. The boards I’ve used in the past all have manuals down to the chip and I won’t touch anything that doesn’t.

whizzter 6y ago
And with a 8x smaller price it's perfect for throw-away units. I've heard of people who use it for projects were you place things out in the environment where you really have no control over vandalism, animals,etc so just replacing a cheap unit here or there isn't a big deal.
detaro 6y ago
On the other hand, a surprising number of companies decide they don't need that kind of dcoumentation and just ship Pis, and that often works fine too. Not for things with deep hardware integration, and not for mass-scale, but plenty things just want "linux in a box with some simple peripherals".
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  As the person tasked with debugging one of those "linux in a box with some simple peripherals", I'm not even 100% convinced they sell them with more than the intent of the consumer turning it on once, playing with for a few minutes, then forgetting it exists.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Oh, not just talking about consumer devices: if anything, I would expect more non-consumer cases (but that could be a wrong estimation)

wlesieutre 6y ago

Because it boots linux and starts at $5

lflux 6y ago

Even then i'm not sure Broadcom would give you that. They're very aware that they're your only source for $chip and will treat you accordingly. (A few employers ago, they were the only source for ethernet PHYs for a carrier-grade network product we were building where we supplied our own MAC)

bee_rider 6y ago

You could buy 30 of them, at least one would be more reliable than the board discussed in the article.

jjoonathan 6y ago
But which one? :)
loeg 6y ago
For 30x price you could buy an overpowered x86 and run QEMU.

h3h3 6y ago

Are you aware of the datasheets published by rpi? https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/datasheets.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

detaro 6y ago
Those are very far from complete datasheets, covering only a small part of the SoC superficially.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Yep, the 200 pages you get from there is a bad joke. Even a relatively simple ARM microcontroller (the STM32F1 series) has over a thousand pages of documentation in the reference manual. A full set of reference documentation for a SoC like the BCM2835 would probably come out to 5-10k+ pages.

userbinator 6y ago

It's the "maker" community, who are more than satisfied to glue together half-working things with no real knowledge --- or intent to learn --- about how they work. In fact I'd bet most of them would be scared off by the several thousand pages of documentation an SoC like that usually would have.

gumby 6y ago
> It's the "maker" community, who are more than satisfied to glue together half-working things with no real knowledge --- or intent to learn --- about how they work. Is that any different from all that stack overflow copypasta you find all over source code, where the paster clearly had no idea how that code worked? And I’m talking about people who are being paid to ship code. shudder. It’s a wonder anything functions at all these days.
- deckard1 6y ago
  Can you blame them, though? Not to pick on anyone, but I recently installed a stock storybook setup. Out of curiosity I did a count of all the node_modules (top level + nested). There were >2000 packages installed. Now I know that if I follow the rules of a textbook professional (one that takes security seriously), then I'm obliged to audit all 2000 packages. But between you and the rest of the gazing internet, I don't do this. That's my dirty little secret. I don't give a shit. Gluing orphaned half-assed npm packages together and pretending everything is okay is my job. The ironic part is how many hours we are murdering worrying about TypeScript or unit tests or integration tests and trying very very very hard not to notice that landfill we have placed under our massive rug. There are too many technologies and not enough time to master them. Every time I dive into a popular node package I become more and more worried for the human race. We get things fundamentally wrong and it lives like that. For decades. And people come along and just obliviously use it like that and don't question it. Take something simple, like JWT. Or nonces. Or what people believe and implement around random numbers and how random numbers work (or, often, don't work). Bad information becomes bad code that sits around for a lifetime.
  - 6y ago

tbirdz 6y ago

While the rpi does not have as open a foundation as we would want in an ideal world, it seems like the alternatives are not much better. Do you have any alternative boards that you would recommend to the hacker community?