Rpi Software

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BootRom

The boards do not include NAND or NOR storage - everything is on the SD card, which has a FAT32 partition with GPU firmware and a kernel image, and an EXT2 partition with the rootfs.

We're not currently using a bootloader - we actually boot via the GPU, which contains a proprietary RISC core (wacky architecture ;) . The GPU mounts the SD card, loads GPU firmware and brings up display/video/3d, loads a kernel image, resets the SD card host and starts the ARM.

You could replace the kernel image with a bootloader image, and that would work fine.

Distributions

Source code and binaries for Raspberry Pi will be available at various places from launch, including pre-built Linux distributions.

Ubuntu is currently listed as the default distribution on the Raspberry Pi website, but the Ubuntu developers have now stated they will not be supporting the ARMv6 architecture, so Ubuntu is likely to be dropped.

Eben says (regarding default distribution): "Either Ubuntu or Fedora; the main point in Fedora’s favour is their ongoing support for ARMv6 architectures."

Main page: RaspberryPiBoardDistributions

Development environments

Instead of just using compiler + editor, you can use "development tool chains" which integrate compiler, build system, packaging tools etc. in one tool chain.

Compiler

The Broadcom processor on Raspberry Pi contains an ARM v6 general purpose processor and a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU. No data is currently available on other cores (if any) available in the BCM2835.

ARM

There is broad compiler support including gcc - please see ARM Compilers

The ARM is capable of around 500 BOGOMIPS [1], 5400 LINPACK KFLOPS with software floating point and 22000 KFLOPS with softfp hardware floating point[2].

GPU

The GPU provides APIs for Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.

The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure - the Raspberry Pi team are looking at how they can make this available to application programmers.

The GPU blob is an 18MB as an elf file, plus libraries. It does an awful lot. [3]

DSP

There is a DSP, but there isn't currently a public API (Liz thinks the BC team are keen to make one available at some point).

Other software

Flash

From Eben: "We'll have to take a look. We support hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and have had Flash Lite running incredibly fast. Personally, I'd like to get the official hardware-accelerated Flash 10 going on there, running against OpenGL ES 2.0, but that's something to think about after the launch."

Software hints

This section collects hints, tips & tricks for various software components.

Performance

Performance Page

References