Benchmarking The Potato & Firefly: New ARM Linux Boards

[caligula]

More boards using Mali graphics. One reason the Pi is popular is that it uses a Broadcom GPU and the Pi community has managed to make a functional open source reverse engineered driver.

Actually the functional driver isn't open source. I've few RPis and they definitely don't use the new open source driver. For example LibreELEC doesn't use it. It has still many kernel releases more to go before it's functional for HTPC use.

[libv]

More boards using Mali graphics. One reason the Pi is popular is that it uses a Broadcom GPU and the Pi community has managed to make a functional open source reverse engineered driver.

This (GPU) driver is paid for by broadcom and not reverse engineered, and it would never have happened if a) i had not started lima b) i had not exposed their blatant lie back in 2012.

The bootloader/RTOS stuff is still not open, and the person who last reached a bigger milestone (Kristina Brooks) with that has thrown in the towel as well. It does boot linux, but it is far from pretty and there are very few people using it. There was not that much of a community to support it, just a handful of very brave and very determined people, which i would prefer to call the "Videocore" community, especially since most of the Pi community couldn't care less.

It's a pretty sad situation as well, but at least Eric Anholt got another job out of it. None of the prime movers, be it in the ARM GPU space, or in the videocore REing communities, of course were in any way rewarded or even supported, as is the way of the world.

[Djhg2000]

This (GPU) driver is paid for by broadcom and not reverse engineered, and it would never have happened if a) i had not started lima b) i had not exposed their blatant lie back in 2012.

The bootloader/RTOS stuff is still not open, and the person who last reached a bigger milestone (Kristina Brooks) with that has thrown in the towel as well. It does boot linux, but it is far from pretty and there are very few people using it. There was not that much of a community to support it, just a handful of very brave and very determined people, which i would prefer to call the "Videocore" community, especially since most of the Pi community couldn't care less.

It's a pretty sad situation as well, but at least Eric Anholt got another job out of it. None of the prime movers, be it in the ARM GPU space, or in the videocore REing communities, of course were in any way rewarded or even supported, as is the way of the world.

For what it's worth, I care about running an open driver on my Pi.

@Michael: Will you be testing the PCIe functionality of the Firefly board? Perhaps even with a miniPCIe <-> PCIe x16 slot adapter and a full size card?