Serious Problems With USB and Ethernet On the Raspberry Pi 202
First time accepted submitter rephlex writes "The USB controller used in the Broadcom BCM2835 (which is the SoC the Raspberry Pi uses) has buggy drivers which have been causing problems for many of its users. In addition to this, the Pi can only supply an unusually low amount of current to its USB devices, just 140 mA approximately, and using a powered hub to sidestep this limit exacerbates the issues caused by the USB drivers. Even Ethernet is affected as the Ethernet controller used on the Raspberry Pi is connected to the SoC via USB. This has resulted in packet loss and even total loss of network connectivity in certain situations. Attempts have been made in the past to fix the buggy USB drivers as there are other devices which use this problematic controller. None of these attempts seem to have achieved very much."
It's open! But with proprietary drivers. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still confused as to what the appeal of the Pi is.
They keep touting the damned thing as "open", yet you require binary blobs in the kernel just to get it to boot. The hardware is only "hacker friendly" so long as you're using USB based devices or something that sticks off the GPIO ports, the hardware itself (especially the SoC they're using) is hardly hacker friendly because the entire thing is a proprietary solution that requires proprietary drivers to run.
So can someone please tell me why this platform should be considered "open" at all? It seems to go against everything Linux strives towards. I could see a nice x86 based SoC with a S3 VGA adapter being "open"- all the hardware is well understood and open source drivers exist for everything. The Pi seems to be the exact opposite of that though.
Re:Slightly exaggerated I feel (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you've never had to deal with Broadcom drivers in Linux before. Broadcom is notorious for their poor driver support in Linux, they usually install just fine, but when you go to put the device they control to use it's sporadic at best. It's gotten to be such a huge headache of repeated failure that I avoid broadcom like the plague.
Re:Fix for the USB (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, their "fuses" are technically thermistors, but everyone calls them resettable fuses or PTC fuses or polyfuses. It's not poor labeling.
It is, however, bad BOM selection. It took me thirty seconds on Newark just now to find a resettable fuse with 200 mA limit and just 650 mOhms max initial resistance. Sure, costs two cents more, and it lets through a bit more current. You know what lets through even more current? All the 1 ohm resistors and shorts that people are going to mod into their boards to fix this problem.
Mistakes happen, lord knows I've made enough myself, but did they not test the electrical specs on these boards before sending them out to customers?
Not at all exaggerated, it's BROADCOM. (Score:2, Interesting)
Broadcom does not publish any information needed to write drivers for their crap, that's why.
They do not develop a lot of the things they churn out, but instead go buy up IP cores and
cobble those together to make their products, the cheaper the better. That's another reason
they can't afford to publish anything out in public without a NDA. Broadcom spends money
on marketing, sales, PR and legal and they wouldn't be anywhere without it.
When I first heard about the Raspberries for $25-35 I wanted one. Then I clicked on the specs,
saw it was Broadcom and that was the end of that. I'm happy to shell out $75-$100 bucks for
something that actually works and is documented.