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by userbinator 3947 days ago
I'm sure people have (tried to), but the problem is that, possible legal issues aside, the RPi is not a relatively standard and widespread system like the PC and Broadcom have not released much in the way of documentation. There's so much undocumented, and not enough people willing to go and analyse it all (unlike with the PC).

Although PCs are becoming more closed and blobby with each new generation, the legacy of backwards-compatibility means that a lot of things still work like they used to - in the days when documentation was far more open. IBM released the PC with full schematics and source code for the BIOS. The RPi was released with nothing more than its software and a few very incomplete datasheets.
1 comments
LukeShu 3947 days ago
> IBM released the PC with ... source code for the BIOS.

Um, no they didn't. The BIOS was very much a blob. Compaq spent a significant amount of resources reverse-engineering the BIOS, which made the IBM-PC-compatible market possible.

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userbinator 3947 days ago
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmpcpc150renceApr83_2...

Starts on page 337.

They did it for the AT too (page 161):

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmpcat150ferenceMar84...

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protomyth 3947 days ago
You're right that Compaq went to a lot of reverse engineering effort, userbinator is also right about IBM releasing the source code for their BIOS. They did it to prevent reverse engineering by tainting anyone exposed to the code. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies
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LukeShu 3947 days ago
Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks!
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