Your support for the RPi computer

[Simon Arlott]

On 27/06/12 13:39, Michael Tremer wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-06-27 at 12:39 +0100, Simon Arlott wrote:
>> On Wed, June 27, 2012 11:32, Michael Tremer wrote:
>> > The Raspberry Pi foundation (and Broadcom as the provider of the SoC)
>> > don't apparently like to see their code in the vanilla Linux kernel and
>> 
>> I don't think Broadcom care about support in Linus' kernel, but the
>> Raspberry Pi foundation expect outside help in doing this as they have
>> little of experience in doing so.
> 
> Well, I am a bit disappointed that the Raspberry Pi foundation did not
> try it a bit harder to encourage people working on the code.

It's not clear which code comes from Broadcom and which code was
developed separately.

>> > Then, I stumbled over your contributions (after using Google for a long
>> > time). You have patches for most of the hardware on the Raspberry Pi
>> > computer that has partly been completely rewritten and looks like it is
>> > nearly ready for sending it in to Linus. Am I right on this?
>> 
>> Yes, but there's no USB or ALSA support. The bootloader still needs Device
>> Tree support but this is being worked on.
> 
> So that means the Ethernet port does not work at the moment, which makes
> testing less fun.
> For IPFire, the ALSA support won't be the most important thing.

There are patches to support USB in U-Boot, so you can load and boot a
kernel over the network.

You can also use Ethernet over SPI (up to about 10mbit/s).

>> Yes but there's no support for the "VCHIQ" interface which is required for
>> userspace to do anything beyond 2D frame buffer graphics.
> 
> This is also not very important for the start I guess. If you get a text
> console on the monitor, that would be fine.
> 
> Great to hear that there are plans to make this upstream. I think if
> there is something new to test (we do have a small number of people who
> have the RPi board), you will put that on this mailing list?

I expect USB support to be advertised on the mailing list, although
you'll want to wait for good USB support (dealing with the 8000
interrupts/s using a FIQ handler) which will take more time to do.

-- 
Simon Arlott