Man, I hate how ARM OEMs are screwing up the whole platform as a viable PC-replacement platform, and I really wish they would reconsider some of the money-grubbing choices they made. Having a standardised platform such as the x86(-64) PC platform is fantastic for tinkering and long term support and reusability of your machines; things such as binary only drivers with just 2 year support (coff coff Qualcomm) are an absolute shame.
Re:New Raspberry Pi Model B+
by imtringued on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @07:33AM
(#16583948)
There is also the fact that UEFI is rather suboptimal. They are adopting UEFI on the server chips because they've failed to develop a new standard. They've missed a chance to improve upon UEFI. Now they are stuck inheriting UEFI's problems because otherwise there would be no standard at all.
ugh thats bad news. i can't stand uefi its more a hindrance than help.
Re:New Raspberry Pi Model B+
by SmellyGeekBoy on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @08:28AM
(#16584261)
To be fair, drivers for most x86-compatible hardware are binary-only. Not that I agree with the practice, but there is precedent.
I haven't seen an off-the-shelf x86 machine that actually requires binary-only drivers for essential functionality in a very long time. Sure, there is lots of specialized hardware that no one wrote an open source driver for but you don't buy those from Dell or HP.
Most x86 boxen tend to run tons of proprietary firmware but at least that isn't pinning me down on ancient hacked-up kernel trees.
> only get a very basic framebuffer
You get 3D accelerated Wayland or Xorg with the open source VC4 driver!
You can very easily† pop in an ArchLinux ARM AArch64[0] in there and notice that you only get a very basic framebuffer, sound is just not working at all, and the bootloader is quite incomplete. So ARMv7 it is for me, even with ArchLinux ARM and in spite of my wish for better FOSS support from Broadcom or in Linux mainline.
† I find alarm much much better as a distro than raspbian as it's incredibly straightforward to install, maintain, and use, while vanilla debian is downright painful.
[0]: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-...