[Arm-netbook] Two Questions: MEB/Card/Case and VGA Proto

[luke.leighton]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 7:16 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday, November 4, 2013 14:04:43 Christopher Havel wrote:
>> I was under the impression that the EEPROM served to fix the autoprobe
>> issue -- that is, to identify what devices and capabilities were present
>> on the MEB (or any other 'carrier board') and tell the OS about it.

 there are two possible approaches here.  one is a "cooperative"
approach - the OS is aware and adapts.  the other is a Virtual Machine
approach (lxc, xen, other).  each guest OS is brought up as-and-when
depending on the type of underlying hardware.

 last resort - reboot.  this would be generally bad.

>> Was
>> I mistaken...?
>
> well yes, if you want to be able to bring up all devices on a random
> application board then getting to the EEPROM will be necessary, though that
> will hopefully also be handled by provided tools (bootloader, etc.). i’d hate
> to see that have to be adapted to for every target OS one by one :/

 eventually that's what will be needed.  there are ways to cope in the
meantime.  KDE / Plasma is by far and above the furthest along of all
the software-libre eco systems that will handle the radical changes of
screen and hardware.

> even then, if you don’t care to be able to see every device automatically, you
> don’t even need that. we’ve obviously all been working with EOMA68 boards with
> that so far, right?
>
> what you are limited to are things like USB devices and the rest has to be
> hand-configured.

 RGB/TTL, gpio, i2c - all of those will need (by way of the EOMA68
EEPROM) to be "turned into" discoverable udev-event-driven "buses",
giving them auto-discoverability just like USB, SATA and Ethernet have
automatic hotplugging.

l.