Your support for the RPi computer

[Michael Tremer]

On Wed, 2012-06-27 at 18:17 +0100, Simon Arlott wrote:
> 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.

I think one can say that it has been a bit too few contribution on the
software part of the project. Let's go with that.

> >> > 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).

10 MBit/s is not very much performance especially for a router on the
network.

As I am not a very experienced programmer for hardware drivers, so I
cannot contribute to that part. But maybe some other part?!

> >> 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.

Good to hear that there is active development. I am looking forward to
it and have subscribed to the mailing list to not miss any updates. :D

Thanks very much for your information so far.

Michael