Blobless Linux on Raspberry Pi
Sadists.The Pi's choice of picking one of the most egregiously unsupported and anti-open source CPU cores was absurd. The people doing the absurdly hard work of taking up the slack that the Raspberry Pi Foundation created from this pick AND the RPI Foundations complete unconcern about the situation and open source at large is to me beyond belief. For a thing that purported to be an educational platform, this situation ought never have happened. At the time at least the low price of the decrepit old core was a good useful competitive advantage, I can acknowledge that, but it remains revolting to me that the #1 cheap Linux system is the spawn of some ancient horror Broadcom dropped with ghastly documentation and unsupportable drivers.But congratulations. For some reason people have kept the march of progress going on this beast. The RPI3 is rated for 24GFLOPS which is 1 more than a PS3 cell processor. It's been an unbelievable amount of work to get anywhere near unlocking the unique video core to get anywhere near there, but people keep pushing, so good on them. I still think it's a mistake for volunteers to work so ridiculously hard to build drivers for a core whose maker has contributed so little, spent so long releasing even basic docs, and who implemented so many really weird abnormal subsystems, especially when it was originally atop such an ancient core.But I am sincerely impressed and it has been amazing work slowly wrangling this abomination into order.