firmware

he ESP32 has basically completely displaced it for a lot of those sorts of "GPIO glue" roles. If you didn't need that, like if you just wanted a low-power fileserver or HTPC... the x86 stuff was better, because it actually worked reliably, at roughly the same price. Like literally just go buy an off-lease mini-tower or USFF mini-pc for $10 from a surplus store, even. This goes doubly when you consider all the problems with the early rpi. Like basically it uses USB 2.0 (unidirectional 500mbps) as a system bus... but it also dropped USB packets under load due to bugs in the firmware[0], that nobody outside the Pi foundation could address because Broadcom didn't release the documentation for like 5 years. [0] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297

some variety of non-GPIO IOT thing attaching some USB device to wifi/ethernet, or as a NAS, etc, and the Pi was terrible at these. It had massive reliability problems (unthinkable today) and I went from incredibly excited to bouncing off it hard and learning a lesson about the right tool for the job, and I think I wasn't alone. Part of the problem was the decision to use USB 2.0 as a system bus. Everything including network and disk all hung off a single half-duplex USB 2.0 high-speed bus. And the Rpi firmware had a bug in the USB stack which dropped frames under load, so actually this was unreliable and could lead to corruption all on its own. It took over 2 years after launch for the foundation to fix this fundamental bug in the literal system bus of their hardware (and thanks to broadcom's closed documentation/blobs, they were the only ones who could see the info to fix it). https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19 On top of that, people forget about the non-micro-SD card slot. The fullsize slot just let the card cantilever out into space... but the thermoplastic used to make SD cards actually will soften enough from the heat of the rpi over time to warp away from the contacts and lose connection. Even just stepping up to eMMC (not the most reliable) was a massive step upwards because of how bad the Pi was at not melting its SD cards. And the power adapter situation has always been dire - most USB chargers were utterly unable to provide consistent enough power to avoid brownouts and corruption, and (while you could PXE boot) the hardware was not even capable of PXE booting without at least a helper SD card to load from. Today, it's dire once again, with the Pi 5 drawing 5A @ 5V from the adapter, which essentially no adapter on the market is capable of delivering. The 2B and later models (especially 4B) are enormously faster, the move to OoO cores instead of literal a single-core A57 or whatever improved performance a ton. The change to USB 3.0 (5gbps full-duplex vs 480mbps half-duplex) and getting the USB frame drop bug fixed helped a ton (the pi couldn't even serve a usb hard drive at full speed). And the 4B moved to armv8 which has a drastically clearer standard for binaries than the armv7 situation, which was an utter mess at the start (softfp binaries were a thing for a bit with the early 1B releases iirc!). Admittedly Pi was better than any other arm device but the Liva just ran debian or ubuntu. I actually think it was an utter failure as a product. I cannot imagine having to maintain a whole computer lab of these things melting (softening+warping) the SD cards, can't even PXE boot unassisted, can't get good adapters? Let alone the situation with firmware problems/driver quality and needing (at the time) weird binaries with a non-standardized bootloader etc. Why would you buy that instead of the Liva X for the same finished price? The pivot to "these are for makers!" was a pivot, and then they pivoted again into commercial. Like good for them but it's always been a messy product with an uncertain target market. It was always borne largely on the backs of enthusiasts shoving it into various home-server and IOT usage, most of which didn't actually need a GPIO. And the GPIO thing was always better served by the ESP8266 in most situations, and that ecosystem really matured almost in parallel with the Rpi. So sure, while the Pi got more suitable for actual GPIO hobbyism over time, so did everything else too. I regard the whole thing as fundamentally having been overhyped and a waste of time by people who (in most circumstances) really should just have bought a booksize or an off-lease OEM USFF desktop. That was me. Got an old Core2Duo desktop for $10 at a surplus sale, that became the fileserver I was trying to build, which instantly ended the reliability struggle I'd been having (rpi lasted an average of 1-2 months MTBF in my homeserver usage) then I got a couple booksize and nettops and ended up with NUCs etc which are just a far better fit for what I'm trying to do. To each their own, but again, I think really very few people are interested in them for the GPIO stuff, it's the "$35 for a little computer" thing that draws people in, but that's an impedence mismatch to expectations, that's not why you should buy a rpi/if that's your use-case then there are better options.

he first gen also had reliability problems due to the full-size SD cards being unsupported in their slow and tending to warp a little bit with sustained warm-ish temperatures and questionable power adapters people were using, so they weren't even something I'd really want to administer, the reliability wasn't there. I know a lot of these have been fixed over time in various fashions (the microSD card doesn't cantilever out into open air, so it doesn't tend to warp as much, and people have figured out better adapters, etc) but the early experience was rough and the software issues were exacerbated by Broadcom's high level of secrecy with their documentation. And unlike Asahi, there wasn't the drive to "figure it out" and write your own implementation/documentation - just as an outsider it seems like the existence of documentation (even if nobody outside the foundation could see it) killed the drive to reverse-engineer it. Why go to the effort ifthe documentation exists, type thing.

w the forum and maybe the firmware issue tracker is the only source of information. In general, the direction of using more standardized APIs like DRM, Mesa 3D for GL and so on seems like a good idea regardless. I guess we'll just have to give all that more time. The HEVC decoder is using a patched FFmpeg with direct communication with the hardware API. In the future there will be an V4L2 API and corresponding method in FFmpeg (see https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=247897). But that's not completed yet and there's no release date announced. I would guess once that's out, the whole decoding process will be a bit cleaner than it is today. But so far I works pretty well. I ran into a ton of firmware lockups during development, but most of those are fixed now. One thing I didn't manage to do yet is to decode two videos at the same time. That's something the H264 decoder could do. See also https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=2520...