Raspberry Pi 3's BCM2837 SoC Now Supported By Mainline Linux 4.8

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi 3's BCM2837 SoC Now Supported By Mainline Linux 4.8

ARM platform enablement continues in Linux 4.8 with several new targets being supported by the mainline Linux kernel. The most notable ARM Linux 4.8 addition is support for the Broadcom SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 3...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ARM-Platforms-Linux-4.8

[caligula]

Nice, I can finally switch from orange pi pc 9/2015) to rpi3 (available since 2/2016). There's a huge competition with allwinner but unfortunately allwinner got there first with mainline support. It's amazing how they can afford millions in mainline kernel support while the super popular and 100% more expensive Raspberry struggles with its deeply talented community.

[jacob]

So does this mean it will finally be possible to run a 64bit distro on the Pi3?

[geoffrey]

By looking at the pull request:


New platforms for this cycle are:

32-bit:
- Broadcom BCM23550
- Freescale i.MX7Solo
- Qualcomm MDM9615
- Renesas r8a7792

64-bit:
- Broadcom BCM2837
- Renesas r8a7796

Out of those, BCM2837 might be worth pointing out since it is the SoC
used on Raspberry Pi 3, so it's great to start seeing support there.

As contributors go, the top 15 authors of patches are:

Geert Uytterhoeven (73)
Krzysztof Kozlowski (41)
Javier Martinez Canillas (36)
Ben Dooks (33)
Hans de Goede (33)
Alexandre Belloni (29)
Arnd Bergmann (25)
Chen-Yu Tsai (23)
Srinivas Kandagatla (21)
Thierry Reding (20)
Jon Hunter (19)
Andy Gross (18)
Alexander Shiyan (17)
Florian Fainelli (17)
Sergei Shtylyov (17)

I guess a 64-bit OS is justb around the corner.

[wizard69]

Nice, I can finally switch from orange pi pc 9/2015) to rpi3 (available since 2/2016). There's a huge competition with allwinner but unfortunately allwinner got there first with mainline support. It's amazing how they can afford millions in mainline kernel support while the super popular and 100% more expensive Raspberry struggles with its deeply talented community.

I've never understood the negativity with respect to Allwinner. They aren't perfect, no company is, but they are at least trying to do open source. Hell some see their code quality as crap, which I'm not going to judge myself, but you don't build a development team from ground zero and get beautiful code right from the beginning. It simply takes time yet they have managed to get support into the kernel for their chips.

[wizard69]

I guess a 64-bit OS is justb around the corner.

This is perhaps the most interesting thing to come to these SOC designs recently. It provides the community with a way forward for a couple of decades or more. It won't be long at all before we start to see these boards with +4GB of RAM and other features that make them highly versatile. Speaking of RAM it is perhaps the greatest short coming of some of the older boards, I see a bright future for these little credit card computers.

As for a 64 bit OS I don't think that is far away now. Most of the interesting code in the repositories are 64 bit clean so minor porting is all that is left, maybe 3-6 months for a really stable release. The next few months will be interesting.

One thing for sure it is an interesting time for low cost computing. These board really bring into question the wisdom of trying to make use of used computers for those little projects one imagines and builds. I like to reuse stuff as much as possible but the economy in these boards just makes it foolish to dwell on old hardware. Not to mention power usage and other positives of the new SOC.

[starshipeleven]

I've never understood the negativity with respect to Allwinner. They aren't perfect, no company is, but they are at least trying to do open source. Hell some see their code quality as crap, which I'm not going to judge myself, but you don't build a development team from ground zero and get beautiful code right from the beginning. It simply takes time yet they have managed to get support into the kernel for their chips.

1. Allwinner is still blatantly violating GPL in most of its SDKs and its media subsystem driver
2. the ones adding opensource support for allwinner hardware are "sunxi team", not affiliated in any way with Allwinner.
3. you're wrong.

[caligula]

1. Allwinner is still blatantly violating GPL in most of its SDKs and its media subsystem driver
2. the ones adding opensource support for allwinner hardware are "sunxi team", not affiliated in any way with Allwinner.
3. you're wrong.

And yet, the sunxi team is able to produce uboot/kernel for new chinese boards even without any direct funding. The boards are so cheap that nobody can afford paying for driver development. OTOH, the Rpi foundation earns tens of millions and as a non-profit, they should be investing truckloads of money on driver development. Still the pesky sunxi team gives them very tough competition. How come? Each Rpi board has 10 000 times more beta testers than any chinese board. Heck, the sunxi team might not even own the board they happily support.

[starshipeleven]

And yet, the sunxi team is able to produce uboot/kernel for new chinese boards even without any direct funding.

They have full access to NDA-restricted material, like say the manuals with all hardware registers they also uploaded here on their own servers, just to show they don't give a shit about any reaction from Allwinner http://dl.linux-sunxi.org/A20/A20%20...2013-03-22.pdf

Raspi had none of this for a long while and now there is some PARTIAL info for the GPU.

Being Chinese cuts both ways, they cannot really retaliate on any NDA or copyright violation done outside of China (and even then it's not hard to get away with it even inside China), for example I can also find EASILY SDKs for Mediatek wifi SoCs for example and I've seen some full SDKs for their mobile SoCs too passing by while I was looking for something else.

OTOH, the Rpi foundation earns tens of millions

No they don't. Unless you are making a total with all they earned till they started businness.

they should be investing truckloads of money on driver development.

reverse-engineering you mean. They do, in the last 4 years they basically reverse-engineered the whole damn thing apart from boot firmware.

Still the pesky sunxi team gives them very tough competition. How come?

already said, access to NDA-only info and much more interest from actual programmers since the Allwinner chips tend to have TRUE interfaces like say Sata or Ethernet, not putting all shit on a SINGLE USB port.

Each Rpi board has 10 000 times more beta testers than any chinese board.

huge amounts of beta-testing does not matter as much as you might think.

Heck, the sunxi team might not even own the board they happily support.

Speaking out of your ass much? They do own the hardware they develop for, you can't develop blind.

[pal666]

they are at least trying to do open source

not really

they have managed to get support into the kernel for their chips.

they didn't. other people did it instead