[hermanhermitage]

For what its worth, I along with some others have reversed engineered the Scalar, Vector and QPU instruction set of the VideoCore processor in the Raspberry Pi.

Some documentation is at https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv

It hasn't been updated in a while as I'm operating under a self imposed embargo - the reason for which will become obvious soon.

Always looking for more input.

(EDIT: There is also a plan to release a beginners guide to reverse engineering).

[Zenst]

That bit of information is worthy of a fresh article in itself. Will garner more people who can assist on carrying it on than it might hiding as a comment on a article that clearly has not heard about this great work.

[hermanhermitage]

Sure the original idea was that along with a recruitment drive for tools such as LLVM and so forth.

But I'm tied up launching a startup right now...

Definitely want to build a community / set of projects around it.

(EDIT: Let's also be clear there is a game of chess in play - hence the slow disclosure here.

My interpretation from reading various articles is Eben is fairly libertarian, I'd expect him to be pushing to open up everything possible - but Broadcom will be providing the usual big company resistance. So if the pieces are played correctly we will have everything open to the extent it doesn't impact the commercial objectives of Broadcom. In this case I suspect we will at the end of the games-play have open source where it needs to be, and at least have a hook for letting people write custom VideoCore Scalar/Vector and QPU code kernels with suitable documentation. This would be a lovely compromise. I'm sure Eben himself would be all for open sourcing his shader compilation VideoCore stuff (see the topic of his PhD thesis) - as everyone enjoys seeing their work get some recognition), but I dont think Broadcom would allow that :). )