[Arm-netbook] Some Pine64 Experiences (via Planet Debian)

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 12. October 2016 15.23.00 Matt Campbell wrote:
> Luke, I'm surprised you're interested in the Ingenic SoCs again. I
> thought you had given up on them because there aren't any current libre
> distros for the MIPS architecture. Has anything changed in that regard?

Luke mentioned the M150 in the context of a video camera, but my impression 
was not that it would be the SoC in an actual EOMA68 card, but rather that it 
would be part of the actual camera hardware itself. The product page indicates 
"Embedded 128MB LPDDR" for the M150:

http://www.ingenic.com/en/?product/id/12.html

Just that part as is would make for a nice upgrade to the jz4720 used in the 
Ben NanoNote. :-)

It would be interesting to know what the "GPU" is in the related M200 
products, however, and whether it is anything supportable in future. Those 
products have one "fast" (1.2GHz) and one "slow" (300MHz) core and support for 
external RAM.

On the topic of distros, gNewSense did support mipsel for the Loongson 
hardware, but it seems unlikely that this support will continue without 
suitable hardware (without proprietary firmware requirements, of course) being 
made available. So we have a chicken and egg problem! Of course, Debian still 
supports mipsel, so the issue is nothing to do with general software 
availability.

Paul