--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 8:24 PM, Bill Kontos vkontogpls@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.