[Arm-netbook] Olimex is making an "open-source" laptop...

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 7. February 2017 17.17.14 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 4:01 PM, Jonathan Frederickson
> > 
> > Sure, but is that a result of the hardware actually being that
> > different or is it just because manufacturers aren't actually
> > upstreaming their code? In the latter case, everyone would have to
> > keep rewriting driver code, but not because it doesn't already exist -
> > just because they can't cooperate.
> 
>  it's a byproduct of the N (designs) times M (processors) problem.
> Fabless Semi A flatly refuses to mainline their kernel because it
> costs them too much time and money to do so, passes it OEM B who just
> compiles it maybe makes a few (GPL-violating modifications) and chucks
> product out the door.

Interestingly, although Ingenic (mentioned earlier) have always seemed to 
target older kernels - you can't really blame them if it's what their 
engineers know, they can get stuff out the door easily, and the Linux 
speedboat is not exactly their fault, anyway - at least they released all the 
code, and the various jz47xx SoCs appear to be supported pretty well in the 
mainline, thanks to various people forward-porting those code drops.

(I recently promised to test mainline kernels on the Ben NanoNote, and I 
mustn't forget to get back to that.)

So although there's limited libre operating system distribution support for 
those SoCs, mostly because of a lack of commitment from those distributions, 
fuelled by a perceived lack of available hardware to build them natively, the 
kernel support is probably pretty good. Of course, you can't guarantee that 
stuff won't be thrown out of the speedboat, but the situation has been 
surprisingly good for a couple of years at least, I'd say.

Paul