I apologize for DOS'ing the list, I can only get online about once a week.
On Thu, 4 May 2017 17:13:23 +0200 "mike.valk@gmail.com" mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:
2017-05-04 9:04 GMT+02:00 John Luke Gibson eaterjolly@gmail.com:
Since it seems like a trivially simple task that for some reason no one has taken up, I would like to take the opportunity to exercise a learning experience and simultaneously benefit the community, by liberating PocketCHIP by deblobbing the source and re-compiling.
The PocketCHIP is powered by their SoM: http://linux-sunxi.org/NextThingCo_CHIP
That is apparently a Allwinner R8 pared with an external rtl8723bs Wifi/BT chip.
The R8 is a rebranded A13.
What? I own one of those and I'm almost certain that the CPU is an A7. Let's boot the PocketCHIP up... The processor is detected as an A7. I'll attach the output, it would probably be interesting to see all of it... Done, it's compressed bzip2 since it's ~300KiB decompressed which is large for an email.
<aside> I'm not too clever with gpg yet, so please tell me if the compressed file is also signed (I wanted to do that so that you could be certain that it was not infected en-route like happens to MS .cab files far to frequently (even though I don't have my key signed by anyone yet \me grumble grumble)). </aside>
Unless your saying that the WiFi has a built in ARM R8 (Why)? which would really surprise me considering how large the processor chip is compared with the WiFi chip.
If you look at https://getchip.com/pages/chip
You'll see: On the left image the RAM (Hynix) and Wifi+BT (Realtek) and Power module (Allwinner AXP209) On the right the SoC (R8/A13) and NAND (Samsung)
The A13 does not need blob's to run anymore, the WiFi+BT chip does. AFAIKT
Display output needs some checking in Linux and U-boot mainline. But most should be available or somewhat easily hacked in.
GPU needs a BLOB which does not work on mainline AFAIKT. Luc Verhaegen did get quite far before he burned out.
<snip>
You're not giving us enough details. Who is Verhaegen? What did he burn out on? When I first considered purchasing a PocketCHiP I read about the GPU not having 3D capabilities because of a binary blob. So, the CHIP folks hired (I think it was an extended goal of the kickstarter campaign), a kernel dev to add support to the Linux kernel for the GPU. I was going to mention this on this list before, but it's been so active...
Sincerely, David