Raspberry Pi Firmware/GPU VHCQ issue

Since the update on Oct 5th the boot hangs on the VHCQ section:

“Oct 5, 2012 “Move to newer version of GPU source tree (LKG56)”

I will do some more testing as there is an Oct 06 build just out, but it looks like from inital look that it’s broke the VHCQ code somehow.
It still boots, gets a screen etc.
Just hangs on the splash screen at predesk VHCQ section.

The last working firmware is 23th Sept.

24th Sept is Busted for me
“use system timer for udelay, so unaffected by cpufreq”

Yes, it looks like they’ve made a big update to VCHIQ. I’ll give them a day or two to fix all the bugs and then try porting over the new code. It looks like they’ve replaced some bits of the OS abstraction layer with direct calls to Linux APIs, so hopefully they won’t have made it too hard to port over the new code.

Still no sign of the BSD licensed version!

Still no sign of the BSD licensed version!

Does this matter? It’s about time the RISC OS image was released officially…

If the VHCQ code is GPL it is only a module on the disc isn’t it?

Does this matter?

Not to a great extent. But it would be nice to have the module in the ROM so we can get sound + hardware cursor immediately on startup.

It’s about time the RISC OS image was released officially…

It’s moving ever-closer…

It’s moving ever-closer…

I can read between the lines of the ‘latest changes in CVS’ to see that things are coming close to a conclusion. Extremely impressive amount of work of very high quality. The issue of changing firmware (to meet specific needs of Linux) will be forever with us but releasing an SD card image as a whole will ensure the rom and firmware work together.

Cheers and yes, our goal is to get the complete image sorted out so people don’t need to worry about such issues. Ideally, we’ll also be using PackMan to manage the updates which should also help with dependency control, but this isn’t quite finished in terms of back-end support and testing. We can roll that out over the coming weeks, hopefully.

Are you going to include !Store (plingstore) in the disc build? This seems to work well. (An early version is in the 22Sep alpha and the software self-updates).

!Store and !PackMan are both in the image.

Since the update on Oct 5th the boot hangs on the VHCQ section:

“Oct 5, 2012 “Move to newer version of GPU source tree (LKG56)”

And now they’ve suddenly decided to revert the changes. Good job I only got part way through porting the newer VCHIQ sources over the weekend. I think next time they update I’ll leave it for two weeks instead of one.

I think next time they update I’ll leave it for two weeks instead of one.

Careful, in Linux land they’ll probably have ditched VCHIQ altogether in that amount of time for something bigger, slower, harder to port and completely incompatible.

Careful, in Linux land they’ll probably have ditched VCHIQ

I thought they had but apparantly ‘vchiq is there, just not updated to vchiq 5.’ The 15 Oct start.elf, bootcode.bin and loader.bin (which I fortunately downloaded) managed to capture a time where VCHIQ had not been ditched (or updated) but provision for 512Mbyte memory had (just) been added.