[object Object]Feb 28

things are going just great for raspberry pi:

- the only distro that ships the drivers for my display is raspberry pi os so fuck it, terrible it is
- I dd it to the microsd card
- I can’t kvm to the pi4 cause nothing uses microhdmi so I don’t have an adapter
- there’s no way to configure networking and SSH without imager cause all methods were removed in favor of fucking Canonicial cloud-init of all things, which they haven’t actually implemented
- my nixpkgs has a broken rpi imager

Show thread[object Object]Feb 28

holy fucking shit maybe it should go without saying that I’m not asking for help and I’m especially not asking for help based on something you got from fucking ChatGPT

raspberry pi community are you ok?

Show threadneoludditeFeb 28
@zzt @jpm They hired a UK spy cop a year or two ago and a lot of people left the community over it. Mostly the rPi community is just techno fascists and other morons now.
Show thread[object Object]Feb 28

@neoluddite @jpm buying this rpi was like pulling fucking teeth for me because of that, it’s an absolute last resort purchase I still regret

unfortunately, these fuckers have done the techfash thing and made themselves a broken ecosystem with no way out

not that most of their shit community will notice, they just want a digital picture frame that runs openclaw or whatever horseshit some rpi influencer told them they should build

Show threadI love this, so IFeb 28
@zzt @neoluddite yeah I absolutely get it. The other half of it is, RPi isn’t for hackers, it’s for industrial control systems. See who they kept selling to during 2020-2023.
Show thread[object Object]Feb 28

@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

Show thread"Musty Bits" McGeeFeb 28
@zzt @jpm @neoluddite run that boot GPU thing by me again??
Show thread[object Object]Feb 28

@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

THE BOOT ORDER OF THE RASPBERRY PI IS UNUSUAL! – blog

Show thread[object Object]Feb 28
@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.
Show threadcrzwdjk ✅ Mar 1
@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.
Show thread[object Object]Mar 1
@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.
Programming a GPU on bare metal

Show thread[object Object]Mar 1

@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

The librerpi project

Show thread[object Object]Mar 1
@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.
Show threadcrzwdjk ✅
@zzt On a technical and slightly pedantic point it's not the "GPU" as such that's in control, it's an embedded ARM (Cortex-M I think) secondary processor that controls the boot process. Which is not that unusual for SoCs really, the unusual thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it runs an opaque blob all the way until loading the Linux kernel and that that opaque blob keeps running even after the kernel boots, Linux AFAIK has no driver that uses the secondary processor.
Mar 1 at 3:02pmWeb