Allwinner ARM Boards With SATA See Big Speed Boost From Single Line Patch

[andyprough]

Why do SOC venders still think NDAs and blobs without source are profitable? The most open SBC vender (rpi) soled 20 million units. The second best supported SBC vender (Odroid) sells out. RISC-V can't come soon enough.

Maybe they see it as a way to try to hide their patent infringing and license infringing hackery? I'm just spitballing here...

[ldesnogu]

Why do SOC venders still think NDAs and blobs without source are profitable? The most open SBC vender (rpi) soled 20 million units. The second best supported SBC vender (Odroid) sells out. RISC-V can't come soon enough.

It's not because RISC-V is "open" that chips using it, be they CPU or complete SoC, will be open too.

[Guest]

It's not because RISC-V is "open" that chips using it, be they CPU or complete SoC, will be open too.

The license is permissive, so you can expect companies to take the design and modify it in such a way that they'll have effective monopoly on software for their chips.

[LoveRPi]

Why do SOC venders still think NDAs and blobs without source are profitable? The most open SBC vender (rpi) soled 20 million units. The second best supported SBC vender (Odroid) sells out. RISC-V can't come soon enough.

This is factually incorrect. RPi is one of the more closed ecosystems. Closed source firmware and proprietary lockout such as DSI and 8MP CSI.

ODROID puts proprietary lockout in their software as well such as their ATF and images.

[elatllat]

This is factually incorrect. RPi is one of the more closed ecosystems. Closed source firmware and proprietary lockout such as DSI and 8MP CSI.

Yes technically the RPI has closed portions, but it has an open GPU and good vendor support which is more than most alternatives https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/rasp...y-for-quake-3/

[andreano]

the vendor will sometimes scramble the order in which registers are addressed—maybe in some attempt to hide that they stole the IP?

In the case of this SATA driver, what the author did was realize that the Allwinner chips used the same IP for their SATA interface as TI did. But, where Allwinner didn't document the hardware well, TI did.

Mind blown!

Glad to hear that NXP is in the "good" category with TI, as I've sponsored them both privately and professionally.

[pal666]

This is factually incorrect. RPi is one of the more closed ecosystems. Closed source firmware and proprietary lockout such as DSI and 8MP CSI.

this is factually incorrect. rpi is the most open arm. firmware is hardware's implementation detail and all hardware is closed. but rpi has documentation and mainline drivers produced by vendor, unlike chinese shit which relies on someone doing reverse engineering

[wizard69]

I wish they would come up with some "VESA standard" or something which dictates how some basic accelerated functions should work and everyone should have those as a minimum and then they can do whatever fancy stuff they like in whatever way they want on top of that.

This is where I have hopes that a manufacture will introduce mass production ARM based PC. If successful it could define a hardware mapping others could build off. Right now we don’t have anybody that has the drive to do this even if the likes of MS seemed to be moving in that direction. I’m starting to loose hope that a high volume ARM based system, that is open, will ever appear.

[wizard69]

Mind blown!

Glad to hear that NXP is in the "good" category with TI, as I've sponsored them both privately and professionally.

I suspect that the reason NXP and TI are more successful is their very long histories in the embedded world. If a good part of your business revolves around selling parts to industries that use those parts in very creative ways, then you pretty much have to be open. TI for example has complete chip sets designed for use in multi meters. NXP has very interesting chips for the auto industry which would be useless if engineers couldn’t access the hardware. In a nut shell they have product that is nothing but sand if the buyers can’t access the specialized hardware on chip.

[LoveRPi]

Yes technically the RPI has closed portions, but it has an open GPU and good vendor support which is more than most alternatives https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/rasp...y-for-quake-3/

This is not factually correct. The GPU is completely proprietary with a FOSS linux driver. Other GPUs like Mali are more open in that they do not need this proprietary firmware but their FOSS linux driver is still at the early stages of development.