4 Jul
2012
4 Jul
'12
1:41 a.m.
On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 01:27:38PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
On 3 July 2012 13:10, David Cantrell <david at
cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
I remember OpenBSD people complaining bitterly about the abundance of binary
blobishness with the RPi. Not that I have any bad feelings personally about
the RPi but compared to other more open devices it doesn't seem to have much
future if Linux is the only OS that runs on it. Only time will tell. I'd
like an ARM-based development machine but I would look for a product with
Tier 1 BSD support before I would buy one. Even a Guru Plug running
Slackware looks much more attractive than the RPi at this moment in time.
On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 07:56:52PM +0100, Tony
Duell wrote:
You probably need to use their boot-loader, to get the ARM part of the
chip started, although I'm speculating here, I've not bothered to even
look for that documentation, because I don't care. But once the ARM has
started, I presume that everything after that (modulo some X11 drivers)
is bog standard Linux, so could be replaced.
There are non Linux operating systems being ported to the Pi (RISC OS
and at least two BSDs). I seem to recall some grumbling about less
than comprehensive documentation on bringing up a new OS on the
hardware, but I suspect that will also be fixed in time, plus it
always helps when you have multiple independent OS implementations for
a platform :) > The
machine boots because the GPU reads a FAT filesystem on the SD
card, looks for files of certain names, loads them into RAM and then
boots the ARM core and starts it executing.
Is that fully docuemtned? In otehr
wordsm if you don't want video
functions at all, can you work with the bare metal?