“New” old functionality with Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) | Hacker News Reader

“New” old functionality with Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy)

raspberrypi.com

57 pointsrcarmo7 comments

> Hardware acceleration of Chromium takes a significant amount of support time; for every release we have to re-port our hardware interfaces.

Does anyone know why this is?

I'd have assumed Chromium would use stable interfaces like opengl/vaapi, and once rpi had a stable implementation of that interface they'd be good forever?

The BCM on the pi is not open source friendly and some drivers are reverse engineered with some bits needing binary blobs. Honestly it's not a great SoC and originally started life as an EoL'd set top box chip if I'm not mistaken. I mean it boots from the GPU because booting from the CPU was not secure enough for cable companies or whatever vampires they intended to sell to. That's just one of the goofy quirks.

The big question is why the rpi foundation doesn't just provide enough upstream functionality to use an off the shelf distro at this point. The landscape has changed significantly since they started WRT arm distro's. At this point pretty much every single one has an aarch64 port that could be used on rpi3+ level machines. There are even 3rd party project attempting to make it work across OS's (https://github.com/pftf/). Instead of having people building yet another linux fork, why not join the community?

That’s a question for Broadcom. Those SoCs going upstream is always an issue and not because people don’t want them. It’s just a blob mess.

Is it? Some of it sure, but the rpi foundation has the patches, someone just needs to upstream them. Which has fallen on various members of the community, who's hands are somewhat tied by being a 3rd party. Instead of doing this work, they spend time forking debian. What would be nicer is if those patches just landed upstream so debian, ubuntu, fedora, suse, etc all worked out of the box. So, sure there are some firmware blobs but that doesn't stop the GPU/etc from working upstream. There is a whole linux-firmware project which ships the binary blobs for the wifi/bt/etc, not only for the rpi, but for random x86's/etc.

I might suggest linking to the original post from the RPi folks directly rather than the re-hash blog post.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-old-functionality-with-...

Ok, we've changed to that from https://www.hackster.io/news/raspberry-pi-launches-legacy-op.... Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com