[Arm-netbook] Good netbook based on Cortex-A9

[Gordan Bobic]

On 07/31/2012 06:24 AM, Roman Mamedov wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:36:27 +0100
> Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>  wrote:
>
>>> I assume the reason to care about>1000p is cost ;-)
>>
>> If you're concerned about cost you'll be buying an AC100 anyway.
>
> Uhm, how about no? I hate nVidia and do not want to ever have any of their
> hardware.

I understand the sentiment, but idealism only goes so far for most 
people, myself included. Given how good the value of an AC100 is, I'm 
happy to forego the accelerated video and stick with the frame buffer 
driver (which also makes the machine have an extra 62MB of RAM which is 
handy).

> Also I've read enough horror stories about how everything is so
> awful Linux support-wise on AC100 to not want to deal with such a system
> myself.

I'm not sure who you were listening to, but it sounds like you were 
spoon fed bullshit. All the hardware on the AC100 is very well 
supported. The only thing that requires binary drivers is the GPU if you 
want OpenGL acceleration, but the frame buffer driver works just fine 
otherwise and is what I'm using. The choice between the accelerated 
binary driver and the frame buffer driver comes down to 2 things:

1) Stability - Nvidia's binary driver is buggy and causes bitmap font 
corruption.

2) Memory - Nvidia's binary driver means you have to use the full 64MB 
GPU allocation. If you use a simple frame buffer you can reduce the GPU 
memory to under 2MB which nets you an extra 62MB for the main RAM, which 
is a worthwhile improvement.

> When the vendor is openly hostile to anything open, it makes you work
> for the hardware, not hardware work for you.

Not so fast. Toshiba released full kernel sources as soon as they were 
asked to when the AC100 was released. This produced a working Linux 
AC100 very quickly. All the board schematics (very similar to one of the 
dev boards) were also released which helped further.

But the point is that the only thing on an AC100 you don't have perfect 
drivers for is the GPU, and you are currently in the exact same boat 
with every ARM GPU, including Mali, until the reverse engineered driver 
is fully working with acceleration capability.

I think it's important to strike a reasonable balance between idealism 
and pragmatism. Otherwise your only option is to get a Yeeloong.

Gordan