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by wolvoleo 65 days ago
> Broadcom

Here's the real problem.

It's sad how a company that spawned the raspberry pi in earlier times got so evil so quickly.

5 comments

Broadcom (and to a lesser extent, Realtek) devices had always been anywhere between hit-or-miss and completely unworkable on Linux, LONG before Raspberry Pi came around.
My experience too. Sometimes I did manage to eventually get their cards working under Linux after pulling some proprietary firmware blobs.
Every Raspberry Pi ships with a closed source OS, ThreadX, that boots Linux, BTW.
It's MIT licensed now, which isn't particularly useful when it comes to Pi (there's some Broadcom crap in that boot loader so it won't be open sourced) but otherwise is kind of interesting.

https://github.com/eclipse-threadx

RaspberryPi Foundation spawned the raspberry pi and used a Broadcom SOC.
I always saw Broadcom as evil, and saw Raspberry Pi as just reusing cheap parts from set top boxes or similar, with all the proprietary stuff that that comes with.
I imagine that is because modern Broadcom is a different Broadcom, Avago bought and took the name in 2016.