There's Finally An Open-Source VPU-Side Bootloader For The Raspberry Pi

Written by Michael Larabel in Raspberry Pi on 16 May 2016 at 08:35 AM EDT. 9 Comments
RASPBERRY PI
It took a while, but there's finally the start of an open-source, community-driven Raspberry Pi bootloader.

The rpi-open-firmware is based on the VC4 and toolchain work done by other developers over the past few years with the limited headers made available by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, all of which aren't said to be open-source yet.

This open-source VPU-side bootloader has been tested on the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B, 2 Model B, and 3 Model B devices. This serves as a replacement to the bootcode.bin on the Raspberry Pi software image. This code takes care of initializing the VPU PLL, UART, SDRAM, and ARM itself.

More details on this open firmware for the Raspberry Pi can be found via this GitHub project page.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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