[Arm-netbook] Marvell Armada and Other ARM Open hardware Software News

[Bari Ari]

Another possible ARM solution for open hardware might be some of the 
Marvell Armada's ARM v6/v7:

http://www.marvell.com/processors/

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/09/marvells-tri-core-chip-has-near-ps3-level-graphics.ars

The OLPC XO-1.75 project received a lot of money and open source support 
from Marvell with the Armada 610:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/olpc-gets-56-million-from-marvell-to-build-android-tablet.ars

http://www.marvell.com/processors/applications/armada_600/

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1.75

The GPU cores are by Vivante and not PowerVR.

http://www.vivantecorp.com/mrvl.html

Marvell was interested in open source 3D Linux drivers. I'll check on 
their current state.

There is also a new ARM M3 EC (embedded controller) with open firmware 
similar to openEC and EC-1.75 that will tie in closely with coreboot:
http://www.coreboot.org
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/openec/2011-January/000158.html

EC's are used in notebooks, netbooks and tablets to handle power 
management, backlight, lid open/closed, misc LED's gpio etc. Until now 
the closed BIOS vendors have only supported 8051 EC's. This new 32bit 
100MHz ARM device supports SPI as well as LPC buses used mainly in x86 
chipsets.

coreboot is also just wrapping up it's GSOC project to support ARM:

http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2011/07/20/gsoc2011week-9-boot-arm-using-coreboot-to-romstage/

http://www.coreboot.org/ARM

http://www.coreboot.org/GSoC#coreboot_port_to_Marvell_ARM_SOC.27s_with_PCIe

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-35-openrd-ultimate.aspx

coreboot has advantages over u-boot as firmware when a SOC has PCI, 
PCIe, SAS, SATA etc.
coreboot can also launch u-boot as a payload.

-Bari