On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
When I looked (after it was hyped i nthe press,
and after I had to
navigate past various Rpi pages to get the bits I wanted from Farnell), I
didn't see anything to suggest that this was not the final product.
Neither in the press nor on the sites I (briefly) looked at.
I think the hardware is fixed and final, and has been for a while.
Is it? When I looked a few days ago I found some comment about the I2S
interface. Apparently there was supposed to be one on the Rpi, but
current boards don't have it. I thought I read that future versions
might. In which case the hardware is not non-changing.
[...]
So, the foundation can still modify the firmware
simply by
distributing new blobs, and I guess that for the system to be truly
open, those three blobs need to be reverse-engineered. Again, not
dissimilar to the Amiga Kickstart, IMHO.
There si, I think, one big difference. The program interface (registers,
etc) for the Amiga chips was pbulished. The program inteface for the GPU
on the Rpi is not. That makes a big difference to revese-engineering it.
-tony