Re:Raspberry Pi 4
by kingosticks on Monday June 24, 2019 @05:06AM
(#20261681)
You are right, they probably won't open the blobs if it means circumventing their own DRM, which I think has been shown to be used reasonably. The mpeg license has almost the same argument as the v2 camera, I think we have covered that.
But that aside, "as a chokepoint of control over the platform"? What platform are you specifically talking about?
Re:Raspberry Pi 4
by HeadsUpHigh on Monday June 24, 2019 @05:08AM
(#20261685)
The same could be said about the VideoCore 4 blob which was used to boot the SoC. And yet they just did get rid of it.
I don't think they got rid of the blob, so much as moved it from the SD card to an onboard SPI flash more like you'd find on a typical PC. It's still there and even more required to boot the board than on previous Pis, but people distributing images no longer have to worry about the licensing and other headaches that were caused by having to include it.
Re:Raspberry Pi 4
by HeadsUpHigh on Monday June 24, 2019 @04:21PM
(#20268014)
There's a mainline driver that according to their own statements is now used for the gpu. Whether there's a firmware blob underneath it is a whole other story and as long as it's not something that has to be distributed with the OS I don't see how it should be treated any different than e.g. the AMD or intel gpus.
Cursory examination of rpi firmware suggests that this DRM logic is implemented in start.elf, one of the proprietary blobs required to boot an rpi. This is, in itself, significant, since opening this blob would obviously make this restriction easy to circumvent. In other words, rpi have taken design decisions which essentially motivate them not to open up these boot blobs, but rather use them as a chokepoint of control over the platform, see also [1].
From this, we can infer that rpi.org will probably never get rid of these boot blobs (as opposed to simply not having found the time/resources to do something about them).
[1] https://github.com/nucular/raspi-keygen