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>"Earlier today, Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack un
by fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>"Earlier today, Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob. As an incentive to do this work, we will pay a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers. "
At last!
- marincounty 13y agoJust $10,000? Nice gesture, but they can afford to dig a little deeper. Their card running Quake III at reasonable frame rate on a Pi is a big deal, and these cheap skates know it. (I hope the person who figures it out, doesn't give them the code; just show them and collect $10,000 (A years rent in a bad part of Oakland).
- dredge 13y ago(a) They are a charity. (b) They demonstrated the Pi running Quake 3 at a reasonable frame rate in 2011. There's a picture of it in the blog post. (c) The competition rules say "To submit an Entry, and Entrant shall email a link to a public GitHub repository containing the full source code for the Entry..." so just showing the result wouldn't be eligible to win. That and they already know what it looks like, because of (b).
- sneak 13y agoThey aren't really a charity; they sell a product from a manufacturer (the Broadcom SoC) and were started by Broadcom employees. So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom.
- jpwright 13y agoThey are a UK-registered charity organization, and the Raspberry Pi is much more than just the Broadcom SoC.
- ansible 13y agoWhatever RasPi is, the fact remains that they're selling a relatively open platform at price near production costs. And that platform just got significantly more open. And they are now offering a bounty for the creation (refinement, really) of more free software. Which will benefit the entire community surrounding the RasPi. So that is good. Even if they were offering $10 USD, there might be someone who'll take up the challenge just to get the bragging rights.
- sneak 13y ago"Relatively open" in the way that your mother was "relatively pregnant" when you were born?
- zxexz 13y agoAre you suggesting he's a premie?
- sneak 13y agoNo, I'm suggesting that "relatively open" is semantically null.
- ansible 13y agoNo, I'm suggesting that "relatively open" is semantically null. I don't know if you are familiar with the embedded world, but a large percentage of the offerings (specifically system on chip or SoC) have NDA requirements for the documentation. And many of these platforms don't have a decent Linux port, even though they could support it. Even with SoC vendors such as TI, the graphics core for the OMAP4 (for example) is a binary blob. There is no documentation for that, and no hope that situation to change (in part because TI has exited the mobile phone market). Please tell us of your mobile platform experience, and what vendors you consider open or closed.
- Narishma 13y agoQ3 is already running on the Pi using the proprietary drivers. This competition is for porting these new open sourced drivers to the Pi and using them to run Q3.
- malkia 13y agoIt could be that $10,000 is the amount some mid-to-high level manager can probably write off. Also $10,000 is a significant amount of money.