Was this the result of much reverse-engineering, or was there a recent Broadcom release/leak of the needed information? The files in <a href="https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/tree/master/bcm2708_chip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/tree/master/...</a> are interesting... I'd suggest making a copy of them for safekeeping. ;-)<p>I looked a little more in detail, and this might make it easy to enable/unlock the hardware codecs that were initially locked-down.
Boy, it would be sweet if ARM or someone would sponsor some kind of common system architecture. Sure, lots of vendors would keep making their own boards like Pi, beagleboard, ODROID, etc. But having an extensible architecture like UEFI or similar to facilitate bootstrapping while still being open would be awesome.
I think the video capabilities especially in connection with the CSI camera is what sets the Raspberry Pi really apart from Odroid and so on. It's pretty amazing that it can encode 720p video at 48fps - didn't something like encoding a DVD take like 8 hours 10 years ago?
I wonder, could we see a potential let's say Raspberry Pi 5 use a quad-core RISC-V processor, as well as an open source GPU (and open source everything else)? I think that would align quite well with Raspberry Pi's mission, and it's an an better position to kickstart the adoption of open source CPUs and GPUs than some other noname project.
Ah, the VC4...I had the impression the toolchain for that will be a nightmare to setup outside of the "close guarded internal tools"( which were "fun" to use).<p>Besides except the video stuff I do not see a point of running (lets say a Linux) on the VC4.<p>But still fun moment to see all this being done, congrats :)