[Arm-netbook] EOMA68 libre laptop and microdesktop, soon to launch

[Paul Boddie]

On Friday 27. May 2016 01.08.19 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 11:35 PM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > 
> > I'm sure it'll happen eventually. With the recent bad publicity around
> > their kernel code, perhaps they'll see the benefits of cooperating a bit
> > more with other people.
> 
>  interesting - what happened?  been too busy - any links?

Sorry for the long links...

http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert-for-allwinner-
sun8i-h3a83th8/

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/how-to-root-any-allwinner-device-
running-android-and-most-of-the-chinese-pi-clones-which-bet-on-allwinner-
android-linux-kernel/

It got quite a bit of wider coverage, too.

[...]

> > I guess this is with regard to FSF certification and whether you could
> > offer the jz4775 within a RYF-branded campaign. And I guess that Debian
> > is still out of the picture, which I think is the distro of choice for
> > the MIPS Creator CI20 and CI40, those being perhaps the closest products
> > to what you'd be offering.
> 
>  a modern kernel would be needed, the one i'm starting with is 3.0.8
> (because that's what ingenic have that works) - any dependencies on
> udev tied to later versions and it's game over for a recent OS without
> a lot of extra work.

Did you not get various people doing Linux stuff for MIPS/Ingenic-based 
products involved at some point? The GCW-Zero uses the jz4770 and the 
developers appear to maintain a much more recent kernel:

https://github.com/gcwnow/linux

The MIPS Creator stuff should also be using more recent kernels, too, although 
the following probably isn't where the most recent work has been taking place:

https://github.com/MIPS/CI20_linux

Incidentally, it looks like the CI40 will run OpenWrt, not Debian:

https://community.imgtec.com/platforms/creator-ci40/

You might have more luck with the following:

https://git.linux-mips.org/cgit/linux-mti.git

Even the Ben NanoNote uses a more recent kernel than 3.0.8 - mine runs Debian 
Wheezy on a somewhat newer kernel - but I accept that you'd have to assess 
whether the jz4775 would really be supported properly in any non-Ingenic work.

I can't say that I've been tracking the state of Linux for a while. I did try 
to get a device-tree-capable kernel working on the NanoNote, but the kernel 
support for various devices wasn't there, and I'm not familiar enough with the 
different mechanisms to troubleshoot the various deficiencies. Of course, it 
doesn't help that Linux documentation is in general lacking and/or awful.

Paul