things are going just great for raspberry pi:

[zzt@mas.to]

@neoluddite @jpm holy shit are they still playing availability games with the zero? I remember with the first one they did that to eliminate competitors (this is Broadcom with a non-profit mask on after all)

[zzt@mas.to]

@neoluddite @jpm oooh reading this is going to improve my mood significantly

[zzt@mas.to]

@jpm @neoluddite my favorite thing about the rpi is it started life as an extremely unsuccessful Broadcom set top box board

yes, that’s why it boots from the GPU and why the port layout is a fucking crime

you’d think they’d have undone any of that since then but as you said, hackers don’t use rpi, rpi uses hackers. decades of free labor and goodwill to turn a failure into a success

[zzt@mas.to]

@cap_ybarra I’ve seen @froztbyte call this type “help vampires” before and it fits

[f4grx@chaos.social]

@zzt even the custom.toml method is removed?

[kirtai@tech.lgbt]

@zzt @jpm @neoluddite
I need a Pi5 to make a Zynthian and am very very angry with what's happening.

[zzt@mas.to]

@arichtman @jpm @neoluddite https://patrickmccanna.net/the-raspberry-pi-boot-order-is-unusual/

> The Raspberry Pi uses Broadcom BCM2xxx chips where The “main” processor is a VideoCore IV/VI GPU is activated at power-on. It runs proprietary firmware that handles the boot. The BCM2xxx chips are typically used in set-top boxes for video streaming/entertainment. For these types of devices, the goal is to quickly get to a flashy user interface.

all of this is exactly as goofy as it sounds

[xlrobot@mastodon.social]

@zzt elegantly put to words my pains and frustration with Pi. recently had to reimage an SD card twice, second time using their official imager, just to get SSH on first boot. it felt so unnecessary and regressive... these days, like the company itself

[zzt@mas.to]

@arichtman @jpm @neoluddite if you’ve ever wondered why some people are loud about the raspberry pi not being open source, by the way, this is most of the software end (alongside the vendor distro being riddled with proprietary crap but that comes with the territory in embedded unfortunately). the root of trust and main processor in every raspberry pi since 2012 has been proprietary and under broadcom’s exclusive control. it’s extremely hard to write anything for the GPU if you aren’t them.

[moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org]

@zzt @jpm @neoluddite
If the Raspberry Pi company cared about hackers, they would've leaned way harder into the DIY portable electronics scene.

Imagining a world where every vaguely motivated user builds their own laptops and phones around standardized components (just like with desktops): instead of making gross compromises to get the features they want.

[jpaskaruk@growers.social]

@kirtai @zzt if you're hacky, I was told there is a script of sorts for installing the Zynthian UI on any Debian system in the repo somewhere. Might be worth trying that on an Orange.

@jpm @neoluddite

[mewsleah@meow.social]

@zzt @jpm @neoluddite that sure explains how Eben Upton went from "completely open thing built on a microcontroller beloved of the open hardware community with a Python REPL in ROM" to "this PoS my employer saw the chance to get a tax break on offloading, but hey, it's much faster and runs Linux - job done, right?"

[moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org]

@mewsleah @zzt @jpm @neoluddite
The Broadcom VideoCore line's Wikipedia page reads like a goddamn marketing brochure.

[crzwdjk@mastodon.social]

@zzt @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite That last bit is not quite true, for rpi4+ there are fully open source GPU drivers developed with funding from the raspberry pi foundation and even some small cooperation from broadcom. But yeah the original scheme was that the GPU driver was an opaque blob that ran on the secondary processor and the main OS would basically just do OpenGL over RPC calls to the blob.

[zzt@mas.to]

@crzwdjk @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite unfortunately, the open source Mesa and DRM drivers haven’t changed anything about the root of trust or boot firmware I’m referring to. https://macoy.me/blog/programming/PiGPU has some good information on why; Igalia, who Broadcom hired to do the open source driver work, has a privileged position in terms of the information they can access, and have released only enough code to release and upstream their drivers specifically.

[zzt@mas.to]

@crzwdjk @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite here’s the closest thing I can find to open source boot firmware: https://librerpi.github.io/ (it’s terribly incomplete), and note that UEFI on pi4 and 5 is still just called by the GPU, it isn’t actually boot firmware

here’s a relatively recent official position on the GPU: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=381252 don’t ask, stop being curious about your hardware, you don’t want to use the GPU for anything

[zzt@mas.to]

@crzwdjk @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite for me, Broadcom and Igalia working together on Mesa and DRM drivers is almost indistinguishable from Rockchip and Collabora doing the same. it’s great to have but I won’t applaud it, because upstreaming drivers in a way that barely checks boxes is pretty standard for embedded vendors. Rockchip just doesn’t have a PR arm shaped like a nonprofit to make it look fluffier than it is, and they didn’t structure their architecture such that the GPU is in control.

[kyle_pegasus@scalie.club]

@zzt @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite I just fell into the raspberry pi trap because it's the only platform where VLC's setting to display video on a specific monitor actually works.

in exchange for that feature, it starts "playing" the video before loading it, so the first two seconds are cut off.

£46 well spent!

[icil@app.wafrn.net]

Man, rpi fell off. Minecraft pocket edition with scratch programming was cool when I was in primary

[dan@axillae.telent.net]

@zzt ha, same experience with nixos rpi-installer. And it doesn't refuse to write the image, or tell you the provisioning didn't work, so you sit there like a lemon for ten minutes staring at a headless SBC with a flickering led thinking "I wonder how long first boot is supposed to take surely I can ping it by now".

I ended up installing my RPI zero w using an HDMI video capture usb dongle and vlc running on my laptop