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by techietim 1644 days ago
There is no real point in posting this now: you needed to sign up as a developer back in September in order to purchase this:

> Developers will need to use a coupon code to complete the purchase.

2 comments

Perhaps this page would be better to post: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/RK3566_EBC_Reverse-Engineering

Of course there has been no progress on reverse engineering the epaper display driver in the past three months. Furthermore it is questionable why anyone would need to RE it, considering that the driver is in-kernel. The assembly file that rockchip shipped with their sdk seems like a GPL violation to me.

Good point. That page says the BSP ships with a GCC-produced driver blob, without source. Would be good to hear from the Pine64 folks on whether they've contacted the vendor and demanded source.
Maybe asking politely and offering help would work better. It’s entirely possible the blob was never cleared for release as source.

In the distant past I was hired to provide programs in binary form and many clients refused to pay more for source.

Or, you can just avoid vendors who make you beg for open source drivers.
How many competitive ARM SoC vendors that have good software higiene out there?
Who says I have to buy an ARM SoC. I can always just check out and keep using second hand devices. Or something from Intel, if I need more power.

And to answer your question, two come to mind, NXP and Amlogic.

> There is no real point in posting this now ...

Disagree. I didn't hear about it back in September, and am glad to know they're at least working on this. So, posted it in an attempt to spread the awareness. :)