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What parts of the Raspberry Pi 4 require closedsource blobs? Does RPi 4 require big gpu blob to boot as previos versions?

In other words, which closedsource stuff does RPi 4 need for proper functioning?

Daniil Shchadny
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  • The closed source/closed hardware gpu blob is now stored in the EEPROM (rpi-eeprom package). – Dougie Aug 23 '20 at 18:35

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As @Dougie has commented, the Raspberry Pi firmware is closed source. However, there is a GitHub site for the firmware.

Questions similar to yours do come up occasionally - here's one that may be of interest to you.

To answer your questions, I would say that the RPi 4 certainly requires the "big closed-source gpu blob" to boot Raspbian. However, that's not to say that this firmware is required to boot something else. Perhaps the biggest challenge to an open-sourced alternative to the current firmware is the fact that the hardware itself is also closed source and largely undocumented. This is of course not an ideal situation, but has become a widely-accepted tradeoff judging from how many have been sold.

Seamus
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