Showstoppers for RPI3

Klaus Küchemann maciphone2 at googlemail.com
Wed Feb 26 21:45:44 UTC 2020



> Am 26.02.2020 um 22:21 schrieb Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org>:
> 
> It really is pretty specific to the rpi family, for a pair of reasons:
> 
> - The hardware is just crappy, buggy, limited, hard to work with.
> 
> - Documentation needed to write device drivers is not openly
> available, and getting an NDA in place with broadcom never seems to
> happen despite people over the years saying they would work to make it
> happen.
> 
> For inexpensive low-power boards... For the 32-bit world, the
> Allwinnner hardware is probably best supported, with imx6 a close
> second.  For 64-bit I'd say it's the rockpro stuff.
> 
> -- Ian
> 
> 

Sorry Ian (I'm not talking to you as a human personally, only in technical terms),
You are absolutely right in terms of the Broadcom-closed source…
But 1 example from today:
There was an issue in a (closed source) brcm- firmware…

Openbsd fixed that in their (Open source-self-programmed-publicly available) driver in much less than 1 day!

You as an absolutely skilled driver-developer really should change your mind,
You seem to have problems with the GPL, with closed source and so on but if you look at your BSD Clause license
It? S also not totally free, so all this doesn’t`matter  for adopting adopt brcm-hardware as far as possible ...
Please change your mind because if you go, the next developer thinks:
Oh, Ian are finally forget that stuff, so I will also forget…
And we are hanging here… KernelPanic ;-)

So, as said please don’t feel attacked personally by my words, it’s the opposite:
I just wish you will continue your excellent work on drivers …
Regards
Klaus



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