Raspberry Pi Roadmap

This page is now historical, as RISC OS Pi is now available

Raspberry Pi was expected to launch towards the end of 2011 but was, in fact, launched on 29th February 2012 with the first production boards reaching users in May 2012. The lead time on orders was initially about ten weeks but the Revision 2 board (made in UK) is now (mid Sept 2012) available from stock (5 days delivery) from Farnell. The opportunity to produce a polished RISC OS distribution for it was recognised, which will potentially have a large audience. Before full release, there were a number of areas of RISC OS that need attention. A ‘pre-alpha’ version of RISC OS on the Pi may now be downloaded. Further discussion can be found in this forum thread

See also ideas for the disc image.

Essential, Important

Core OS/ROM image

• USB driver (done)
• SD card driver (done) (forum thread )
• Partition support/ability to find FileCore partition on SD card (done)
• CMOS RAM
• VCHIQ port (required for hardware mouse pointer, audio on HDMI, video planes etc) (done, softload only until licensing resolved)
• Hardware mouse pointer (done, requires VCHIQ softload)
• USB dropping key events (also affects Linux )
• VSync matched to screen refresh (done, needs start.elf of Sep 16th or newer plus fake_vsync_isr=1 in config.txt)
• RTC or sensible time/date/timezone setup when RTC missing (in progress)
• DMA support (done)
• Audio driver (done, requires VCHIQ softload)
• Software reset (done)
• I²C driver (done)
• Alignment exceptions (underway )
• Make VFPSupport handle VFPv2 (partially done; runs but without any support code for FP traps)
• Linux kernel loader (underway )
• Reading MAC address from GPU (done)
• Different colour depths (done, although 16bpp will require RGB 565 support in RISC OS)
• Different screen resolutions (done by scaling display in hardware; no control over monitor resolution at present)
• Hardware-accelerated rectangle copies (done)
• Video planes
• USB CD driver (done)
• Nicer default toolsprites/backdrop/etc (underway)
• Tidy builtin applications
• Accelerated !Boot (done)
• Splash screen (underway)
• Shift-boot?

Disc image

• Popular RISC OS apps ready configured
• Programming tools
• Educational software
• Online help
• Package manager/‘App store’ for advertising further software downloads? (underway)
• !Configure in Apps that runs !Boot (done, but not in ROM build yet)
• PackMan setup: riscos.info default repo, initialise database
• SharedUnixLib managed by PackMan

Materials

• User documentation/videos/etc
• Programming guides
• OS documentation
• Non-RISC OS software/guides (eg how to use RPCEmu, GCCSDK)
• Instructions to disable autorun of welcome webpage

Process control

• Check RISC OS licensing (underway)
• Check licences of bundled software (underway)
• Software compatibility testing
• QA/release testing
• Application source code collection (for that which is available) (underway)