[9fans] Raspberry Pi userland is now open

[Scott Elcomb]

Hi all,

For those working on Plan9 for the Pi, userland is now completely open
source: <http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221>

I need more Pi =D

Best regards,

[s***@9front.org]

Post by Scott Elcomb
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221

Well, they are lying to everyone.
Their "open source" is nothing but a layer of code which calls into a
closed source back-end.

[Nicolas Bercher]

Post by Scott Elcomb
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221

Well, they are lying to everyone.
Their "open source" is nothing but a layer of code which calls into a
closed source back-end.

Do you mean there's a firmware or some binary blob that is still closed?

Nicolas

[c***@gmx.de]

term% theo
Come on.. stop making assumptions.

--
cinap

[BS]

its true, if you read the forum fully...

Post by c***@gmx.de
term% theo
Come on.. stop making assumptions.
--
cinap

[Richard Miller]

In practical terms this doesn't make a lot of difference for Plan 9 as it is now. Dev/draw makes use
of only a few simple 2d operations for "accelerated" graphics, and the dma engine on the raspberry pi
SoC provides a 2d memory-to-memory mode which should be sufficient to do these on the ARM side.

But if anyone is ambitious enough to do something more high level - Plan 9 movie player? - it should
be useful to be able to see the API used between the linux high level graphics libraries and
the GPU firmware, instead of having to reverse engineer the protocol on the wire. Now we get
to reverse engineer the linux library source instead. (In my experience linux software can be
so convoluted that this may not be an improvement, but maybe in this case we'll be lucky.)

[Charles Forsyth]

I don't see any problem with having to talk to invisible firmware.
Surely that's normal for devices with firmware?
In this case, it seems even better for Plan 9, because the OpenGL/ES engine
is in the firmware,
so we don't need to write or port one, just talk to an existing one.
It's similar situation to a wireless device I drove some time ago: apart
from a slightly strange protocol to
talk to it, the firmware did all the work (as on the Orinoco cards),
the interface was quite high level, and there was no need for MadWifi etc.
I didn't feel hard done by because I couldn't change the firmware.

[Sergey Zhilkin]

Good !

Post by Scott Elcomb
Hi all,
For those working on Plan9 for the Pi, userland is now completely open
source: <http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221>
I need more Pi =D
Best regards,
--
Scott Elcomb
@psema4 on Twitter / Identi.ca / Github & more
Atomic OS: Self Contained Microsystems
http://code.google.com/p/atomos/
Member of the Pirate Party of Canada
http://www.pirateparty.ca/