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Why doesn’t the foundation release schematics? Their moat is buying hundreds of thousands of SoCs from broadcom, not their motherboard designs.
by sneak 1y ago
Why doesn’t the foundation release schematics? Their moat is buying hundreds of thousands of SoCs from broadcom, not their motherboard designs.
- userbinator 1y agoBecause Broadcom. It seems the biggest success of the foundation is to whitewash Broadcom's image and further normalise closed proprietary systems that have the appearance of being open.
- elevation 1y agoDoes there exist an RPI clone built around a SoC that is suitably open?
- userbinator 1y agoI believe most of these have public (or made-public) documentation available for their SoCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi But for real openness, nothing beats an older x86 PC.
- ajb 1y agoMaybe they've improved, but banana pi/sinovoip used to ship images based on android kernels. Rockchip have a reputation of fully working with the open source community, though I can't personally say how well. Most other SoC vendors only do enough to get android going.
- userbinator 1y agoGiven that Android is basically the most popular "distro" of ARM Linux, that's not surprising. However, I was referring to the availability of documentation which for these Chinese SoCs is either officially released or soon leaked.
- ajb 1y agoLeaked SoC documentation is a very long distance from having a fully working open ecosystem. Like, dozens of man-years -maybe hundreds. It would be a mistake to assume you can pick any of the sinovoip boards and get that. They use a number of SoC vendors with very different business models, and level of support for FOSS. Certainly there are some who make much less investment in maintaining an open ecosystem than RPI.
- justin66 1y agox86 PCs need insecure and ordinarily impossible to replace blobs in order to boot. It's true that PC firmware doesn't seem to hurt open source people's feelings quite so much as it once did, but there's not a ton of logic to that.
- userbinator 1y agoCoreboot has been around for over a decade. I'm not taking the "security" bait at all, especially when we're comparing a PC to an even less-explored platform which also requires binary blobs.
- justin66 1y agoUnless things have changed significantly coreboot is an example of what I'm talking about - not a ton of x86 motherboard hardware is supported very well. "But for real openness, nothing beats an older x86 PC" just doesn't seem true at all. (but I'll look into coreboot. I'd get a kick out of trying it.)
- kofta 1y agoRPi-Pico2 uses the RP2350 which has two cores, one is a RISC-V core, and its source code was released on GitHub.
- IshKebab 1y agoThat's a microcontroller.
- MartijnBraam 1y agoBoth cores are actually ARM cores, but you can switch both cores to be RISC-V cores as well on boot.
- xnzakg 1y agoTechnically that's four cores, two of which that can be active at once
- matheusmoreira 1y agoAre there any good truly open SoCs out there? Seems like it's impossible to find even a single chip that doesn't require some proprietary blob to work, let alone good chips.
- immibis 1y agoPine64 boards tend to be more open, but not fully, as they compromise between openness and price.
- jacquesm 1y agoI think that's a bit harsh. The bulk of the Raspberry Pi audience has no idea of the Broadcom connection. They're kids (like mine) who are looking for a cheap computer to do their hardware hacks with. And a Raspberry Pi Pico is very hard to beat for the money, they're ~5 bucks here single quantity, and far more powerful than Arduinos (and cheaper!).
- IshKebab 1y agoThe competition for "very hard to beat for the money" hasn't been Arduinos for decades; it's cheap ARM Cortex boards, e.g. STM32 Nucleo - or ESP32. I think ESP32 is really the one to beat. Arduino have been lazily cashing in on their brand name for many years.
- StableAlkyne 1y agoIs there a good comparison site anywhere for boards nowadays? I still usually gravitate to the Pi or Arduino, but mostly due to a combination of lack of familiarity with other brands, and being a repeat customer for stuff that just works
- IshKebab 1y agoI don't think so. Mbed used to have a nice one for all the boards that support Mbed, but that's dead now. Looks like Zephyr has an extremely comprehensive list: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/index.html https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/index.html Doesn't include prices though, and it's really too comprehensive - it seems to include lots of boards you can't actually buy. So maybe not very useful for finding good boards.
- arjvik 1y agoWhat’s a “good” RiscV board to start using for small projects? Looking for a successor to the RPi - good documentation, easy to write bare metal for (no SDK), no surprises.
- 1y ago
- sneak 1y agoWhat does Broadcom have to do with the motherboard layout?
- ale42 1y agoThe pinout of the CPU itself might be under NDA (just speculating). Or some interconnection details, or who know what other information you might get from the schematics.
- tubetime 1y agoyes, most likely this is the case. also for the ethernet phy. there's really no good reason for it; these pinouts are pretty bog standard. chalk it up to corporate paranoia.
- blihp 1y agoTake a closer look at the history of how they've been running things pretty much since the beginning. Even though they give away a lot of code under open source licenses (most of it they have to), to me it's always looked like they have run the project as if building a business out of it was the priority. I'm sure their recent IPO will result in much more openness... that's usually how things go, right? Nothing wrong with that, just don't be fooled into thinking they're something they're not.
- ZenoArrow 1y agoTo clarify, while Broadcom is a key partner for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, they don't own all the key silicon that makes it onto Raspberry Pis. For example, the "RP1" chip that is effectively a Southbridge on the Pi 5 was designed by and owned by the Raspberry Pi foundation/company, and the same is true of the chips used on Pi Pico boards. I wouldn't expect a new Pi to use all their own chips, but in theory it's possible.