[Arm-netbook] laptop main board, power board and ingenic jz4775 cpu card

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello,

On Tue, 24 Nov 2015 22:49:06 +0100
Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:

> On Tuesday 24. November 2015 19.36.14 Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
> > 
> > Just as x86-32, ARMv7 has physical address extension
> > http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0438i/CHDCGI
> > BF.html , so it can address more than 4Gb of physical memory. That
> > still leaves 4Gb of virtual memory per process, and thanks god -
> > bloating memory size doesn't mean growing its speed, so the more
> > memory, the slower it all works.
> 
> 4GB or 4Gb? I guess you mean the former.

Yep, 4GiB, can't live up to 21st century standards, yuck.

> Again, I haven't kept up
> with this, so it's useful to know. I remember that the i386
> architecture had support for larger address spaces, but I guess that
> it was more convenient to move towards the amd64 variant in the end.

The way it was pushed on everyone, yeah. And we'll see if the same is
happening now with arm64 - just as you, I skipped x86_64 "revolution",
so can't judge for sure, but as far as I can tell, yeah, it's being
pushed pretty much. Which is only said for projects like EOMA68,
because it's endless run, and all the careful selection of nice 32-bit
SoCs risk going down /dev/null, being consumers soon will meet classic
stuff with "wwwwhat? it's not 64-bit?"

> > Generally, it's pretty depressing to read this memory FUD on mailing
> > list of "sustainable computing" project. What mere people would need
> > more memory for? Watching movies? Almost nobody puts more than 1Gb
> > because *it's not really needed*. And for sh%tty software, no
> > matter if you have 1, 2, or 8GB - it will devour it and sh%t it all
> > around, making the system overall work slower and slower with more
> > memory. (I'm currently sitting on 16Gb box with constant 100% cpu
> > load - it's Firefox collecting garbage in its 6Gb javascript heap -
> > forever and ever).
> 
> FUD? Ouch! Thanks for classifying some pretty innocent remarks in
> such a negative way. 

Perhaps it was a bit strong, but we all know that EOMA68 project is
rather overdue, and it feels that maybe - just maybe - something will
materialize finally anytime soon. And maybe - just maybe - coming up
with high-end 2Gb module is good idea to show that project can deliver
"bleeding edge" spec, not perceivably lag behind the market midline.
But marketing it with "RAM is (or will soon be) the inhibiting factor
around the adoption of single- board computers." is IMHO will only
hurt the project, as its main goal (unless my memory plays tricks on
me) is to deliver commodity hardware in the hands of people to do
real-world things (and allow to sustainably reuse that hardware for
doing even more real-world things).

So, one of scenario how it all may come up is that all this
sustainability talk may be a marketing gimmick and there won't be much
more sustainability in EOMA than freedom in some fairphone. It will be
a toy for particular kind of hipsters, delivered to them in denim
recycled bags. Luke gets rich and will drive a sustainable personally
tuned Tesla, but not that rich to produce an open-hardware SoC. All
that would be pretty sad finale after all these years.

So, I hope the project will continue to educate how cool it's to run a
home router with server capabilities with 256MB RAM instead of typical
32MB, even if it costs 3x (for starters, hope it gets more sustainable
over time), rather than ship luxuries and proclaiming demise of 1GB
single-board computers.


Thanks for other comments - insightful.

[]

> 
> Some progress is actually worth having, you know.
> 
> Paul
> 


-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com