SWswiley·Oct 19, 2016Submission
Minimal Raspberry Pi VPU firmware
171 points · Open discussionchristinaa
rpi-open-firmware
C2016–2024
christinaa / rpi-open-firmware
rpi-open-firmware
Open source VPU side bootloader for Raspberry Pi.
19Distinct people
24Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
42GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Open source VPU side bootloader for Raspberry Pi.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year24 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-05-16 02:17:47 UTC to 2024-02-18 11:23:06 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesRPi boot blobs are going away:
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
In Raspberry Pi (2 and 3) support in Fedora 25 BetaAlso from that page:
Broadcom publicly released some code, licensed as 3-Clause BSD, to aid the making of an open source GPU driver. The "rpi-open-firmware" effort to replace the VPU firmware blob started in 2016: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware. See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703842
In Experiments with disabling the ME on Sandybridge x230The situation is better than what it was - https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
In ThinkPwn: System Management Mode arbitrary code executionWell, the Pi blob can be replaced… almost… soon…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703842 / https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
Not a ready drop-in replacement yet, but running ARM code with access to the SD card and the UART console is possible!
edit: By the way! The Pi loads all the firmware from the SD card — no reflashable memory on the board AFAIK – which would make it excellent from the "State considered harmful" perspective http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...
In The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be auditedIn the CHIP's case, I don't know, but AllWinner had a tendency to build drivers into the Linux kernel without providing source and use modified versions of various libraries while claiming to have developed them internally.
The Raspberry Pi machines use a family of Broadcom chips. These include some kind of general-purpose processor built into the GPU (sometimes called the VC4 or VPU). During operation, it runs an RTOS that handles OpenGL ES calls, translating them to QPU instructions. During boot, it's the first thing brought up; it initializes the RAM, loads the next level bootloader, then starts the ARM CPU. There's an open-source video driver that does the OpenGL work (and I think actually supports OpenGL, not just the ES variant). There's work being done on making a bootloader replacement, but it's in the fairly early stages (https:/
Read the rest
/github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware).
Maybe someone who knows about the CHIP itself will chime in with more detail on how it compares.
Was this the result of much reverse-engineering, or was there a recent Broadcom release/leak of the needed information? The files in https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/tree/master/... are interesting... I'd suggest making a copy of them for safekeeping. ;-)
I looked a little more in detail, and this might make it easy to enable/unlock the hardware codecs that were initially locked-down.
In Open source VPU side bootloader for Raspberry PiOpen source VPU side bootloader for Raspberry Pi
96 points · Open discussion