[Arm-netbook] Top Priority Software Tasks

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 8:24 PM, Bill Kontos <vkontogpls at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe when you start a future crowdfunding campaign for another card
> it would be a good idea to look at what functionality is missing from
> mainline and factor in some extra costs around paying people to
> mainline these patches.

i specifically picked the RK3288 because of exactly this.  reading
between the lines, google's financial muscle clearly had an impact on
rockchip and got them to comply fully with the GPL *and* get
everything up and running, all aspects of all hardware, as full libre
sourced stacks.

 the only difficulty with the RK3288 is that there are *so many*
muppets out there @begin whine i gotta gweat idea on how ter put
erbuuntewww onna cwohmmebook here's my wuurpwess bhurlooorg gimme five
an'a' facebhuuk liiiiiike @end whine that they're *completely*
deluging *actual* expertise which allows you to get right down to the
bedrock of the SoC.

 many of the wordpress-whiners for example *keep* the UEFI-based
adaptation of u-boot that goes with chromebooks, so all their
instructions are on (a) bypassing the restrictions built-in to that
version of u-boot (b) discussing the UEFI partition format.  those
that aren't chroot environments only, at least.

 actually finding the linux kernel and u-boot source was a bitch: most
of the searches direct you to *google's* releases / trees.

 *EVENTUALLY* i found the right experts on the #linux-rockchip forum
who were able to direct me correctly to the appropriate (libre) tools
and resources (a good percentage of them being on the t-firefly
website), and was able to confirm that yes, you CAN get everything -
including GPU (proprietary / MALI) and VPU (libre) libraries, and yes,
it's completely mainlined, yes it's entiirely device-tree'd, yes it's
full and complete support across the board 100% libre for the full and
complete hardware.

 in short, bill, the A20 was selected as a low-cost option with a lot
of community enthusiasm and willingness to reverse-engineer it, which
has since died out because of allwinner repeatedly fucking about.

 i won't make that mistake again and yes have added much stricter
criteria to processor selection (as you can see from the "Selecting a
Processor" update on the crowdsupply page): ensuring that people
*don't have to be be paid because everything's already available* is
one of the criteria to consider.

 of course if it's risc-v, that's exciting and innovating and gets
people interested and engaged, which completely over-rules the
"everything has to be available already" criteria, because instead
it's pioneering work and we are *empowered* to make everything
available.

l.