Meanwhile, i've been sorting through my pile of old boards, and marvelling just how many revisions of Raspberry Pi there was.
The earliest one i got is revision 0002, with serial number starting with 101 (still 6 digits, however).
Got a few of revision 000e, which looks similar, but behaves differently. Twice the memory and no browning-out the flash drives.
A zoo of zeros, with 4 revisions and 5 different firmware versions.
Then a 2 Model B by Embest and a compute module CM3.
Found a table, and apparently there had been several dozens of them, and with rather confusing naming scheme.
And to think just a few (7...!) years ago there was basically just one, which i wanted to get, preordered from several locations, filled the paperwork, eventually received and... had zero use for until about now.
Speaking of use, so far the best uses i had for them were cameras and IoT gateways/servers.
I've also been hacking it on OS level now, and apparently all the clunky interfaces to the GPU you see in the libraries are *actual* hardware interfaces. A "mailbox" interface to talk to a proprietary OS running on the GPU... Sometimes using shell-like commands...
Sad.
Like, why? Why lock down and close firmwares? Don't you want people using your product?