MBmburee·Sep 15, 2022
https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware
The paragraph 'Does it boot Linux' should answer your questions
In LibreRPi – open source replacements for RPi firmwarelibrerpi
rpi-open-firmware
C2020–2024
librerpi / rpi-open-firmware
rpi-open-firmware
Open source VPU side bootloader for Raspberry Pi.
6Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
466GitHub 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 has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- itszor/vc4-toolchain · linked in 4 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 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 year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-06-21 04:27:21 UTC to 2024-09-05 14:42:02 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 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 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourceslk-overlay contains many different projects
using the vc4-stage1, vc4-stage2, and rpi2-test projects together, you can do the entire boot chain (dram init and loading linux) using open source code
other projects act as demo's or tests on how to run custom code at various stages, but not actually boot linux on the arm core
many of those demos work on the the entire pi model range
pi3 support is only broken due to arm side problems, which could be fixed by just using a different bootloader
and the https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware codebase can already boot linux headlessly on both pi2 and pi3, it uses a different arm bootloader
In How is the free firmware for the Raspberry progressing?