Is Parallella really open?

[hdecharn]

Hi,
I am writing to enquire about Parallella's board. I am creating my own operating system—for educational purpose—and I am looking for an open platform. A wide range of ARM based boards include SoCs with proprietary boot ROMs and drivers.
My questions are:
– How much open is Parallella? Does it require proprietary drivers and/or ROMs—to run correctly?
– What are Zinq-7000 and Epiphany III boot sequence?
Thank you in advance for your reply.

[ysapir]

Yes, the Parallella is an open platform, as much as it gets. All the source files, schematics, part lists and documentation are available for free download.

The Parallella computer boots up as a linux computer, running on the Zynq's ARM processor(s). The Epiphany is an accelerator, being loaded and controlled by a host application running on the Zynq.

[hdecharn]

OK. And what about boot process? Does it require a specifiq bootloader? (Eg: Raspberry Pi, ODROIDs, etc. require U-Boot. Parallella too?)

[9600]

[hdecharn]

[Gravis]

[hdecharn]

[DeanoC]

Sorry for the thread necromancy...

Parellela Open sourceness
Board : Open HW and Open SW (including FPGA chip interconnect RTL)
Boot + Kernel: Open SW and Open HW.
Epiphany: Open SW not Open HW (free development but no chip RTL)
Zynq: Open SW for PS (Arm Cores) but its not Open HW and the PL (FPGA) is closed SW as well
HDMI: Not Open SW or Open HW.

Its currently the most Open Source platform I know of. Its on par with the OpenRisc FPGA board you can obtain. Personally the only one that bothers me is lack of Zynq FPGA open SW, the bitstream can only be produced using closed source tools and has a huge paywell to use much of its capability (reconfigurability for example). There has been attempts in the past to reverse engineer it, but its never got to the level thats really useable in general and more specifically its not cable of series 7 Xilinx FPGAs, so Zynq is not supported.

[Gravis]

[DeanoC]