non-x86 open-source-hardware laptops, let's take stock of Jul 2025 - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 11:53:51 am
content: PreambleSo, after dropping the bombshell "we made THE definitive risc-v laptop" (seehere), to raise money from pre-sales, no one saw anything ("officially released", lol), and I think the "ROMA" laptop is just another one is vaporware marketing garbage.It's easy to think of throwing a CM4 or an RPI into a box (I've also seen wooden ones), throwing in a wireless keyboard... but what comes out isNOT a laptop!A laptopmustcare about the design, in terms of ergonomics, robustness, possibility of putting it in a backpack without it breaking, rather than the commercial nonsense (e.g. mnt Reform, which is also too bloody expensive! >> 1200 euro) of wanting to make it "strange" because it is "Open{ Software, Hardware }".When you install GNU/Linux on a Thinkpad you don't care if you don't have the firmware sources or the motherboard wiring diagram. You care more that your wrists don't hurt, and that the laptop weighs little and doesn't break easily.However, putting Coreboot on the Thinkpad x2*0 flash (replacing the IBM/Lenovo firmware) doesn't automatically make it an "Open Hardware laptop", at most... you have opensource firmware, which launches an opensource kernel running an openssource rootfs.Which is great, but makes sense if you want to spend little and have a more or less open system.... wanting to work on something completely free from past legacy (Wintel), free to evolve, and for which one can have all the technical documentation without having to do reverse engineering, well ..Simple criterion(not considering { ergonomics, robustness, ... } )Code:boolean_t is_ok(x){ans = True;ans = ans logicalAnd x'( CPU.ISA isNot { x86, amd });ans = ans logicalAnd x has "{ firmware, hardware } documentaton";ans = ans logicalAnd x has "enough RAM and CPU speed to run { emacs, gcc, gdb, x11|twm, ... }";ans = ans logicalAnd x has "built-in display{ 800x600|4:3, 1024x768|4:3, ... }";ans = ans logicalAnd x has "QWERTY keyboard";ans = ans logicalAnd x has "built-in { trackpad, trackball, trackpoint, ... }";ans = ans logicalAnd x is "battery powered";ans = ans logicalAnd x is "able to work for at least 6 hours on battery";ans = ans logicalAnd x has "linux support";return ans;}gets this list of things, some make sense, others less (and cost too much)Lichee Console 4A, Portable RISC-V Development Terminal (7" (1)), seehereLichee Pad Max 4A (14"), seehereDevTerm (RISC-V) Kit R-01, seeheremnt Reform, seehereOlimex' Teres-v1.0 aka "A64" (we are discussing Teres-v1.5 and v2.0, seeherePineTab, tablet with detachable backlit keyboard, seehere(andherethe RISC-V version)PineBook/Pro, seehereedit:(1) The text console cannot be used "as is" because the LCD display is rotated. X11 can solve this problem easily.edit2:list[]+=PineTabThe Apple Macbook Air { M2, M3 } has full linux support now, seehere), but ... but all existing documentation comes not from Apple but from reverse engineering.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 12:42:04 pm
content: > able to work for at least 6 hours on batteryThat disqualifies my brand new 16" Lenovo. Maybe 3.5 hours, max.Roma shipped in October or November 2023. I know people who have one. They're a ridiculous price for the CPU speed, but then presumably most of the price is made up of the screen, trackpad, battery, chassis etc not the CPU.You left off PineTab-V, which meets all your stated criteria (except maybe battery life).

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 12:48:46 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 19, 2024, 12:42:04 pmCode:is_ok(PineTab-V) = False;x has "QWERTY keyboard"; ---> Falsex is "able to work for at least 6 hours on battery"; ---> FalseIt's not a laptop, but rather a tablet with an external keyboard -> bad design

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 01:26:02 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 19, 2024, 12:48:46 pmIt's only a difference from whether you unfold the keyboard from the screen/CPU/battery unit, or unfold the screen from the keyboard/CPU/battery unit. The functionality is the same and meets all your previously-stated criteria.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 02:06:34 pm
content: no, it does not. Bult-in keyboard is a completely differnt thing in practice.

author: langwadt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 02:16:03 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 19, 2024, 02:06:34 pmwhat's the big difference?

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 02:17:29 pm
content: here(page 1) I recommend to avoid SoCs made by Allwinner, because they not only mess things up with kernel, dts, firmware, etc., but they sometime release chips with hardware bugs, and worse doesn't even fully comply with Open Source licenses!Rockchip is a better company, and, in my opinion, the RK3328 is decent enough to be called "better".I said "hardware bugs" because I am working with { Neo, NeoAir } SBCs ( Allwinner ARM/32bit SoC) ... and umm, inside the SoC there is a buggy "OpenRisc" MPU, which has so many serious hardware bugs that, not only can it not be programmed in C because it requires manual programming in assembly to work-around its bugs (when it is possible, of course), but for safety it ends up that it is better to force it into perpetual iddle because if it were going crazy it could potentionally access all of the SoC's RAM with catastrophic consequences.That OpenRisc MPU is that part - like in Allwinnder A64 (ARM/64bit SoC) used for the Teres-1 laptop - of hardware responsible for energy management, suspend, etc. It's not at all nice to have hardware bugs in such a delicate component when it comes to battery-powered mobile devices!- -Umm, here it is: feel free to list the best ARM alternatives. Perhaps they will be considered for the next Teres laptop.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 02:32:41 pm
content: Quote from: langwadt on March 19, 2024, 02:16:03 pmA built-in keyboard is typically less flexible than folding ones (especially if detacable folding ones) and offers much better typing comfort, and being usually based on a wired-protocol instead of wireless one (Bluetooth) is better from both firmware and kernel perspective, as it makes the developer's life easier and doesn't even bore you with charging extra batteries.

author: Infraviolet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2024, 11:55:17 pm
content: The trouble is that almost no-one wants a non-x86 laptop. Virtually all the programs one is actually running on a laptop are compiled for x86, that includes Windows executables, Windows executbles that run happily under Wine and Linux native executables. With open-source software one can compile it for non-x86 hardware, in theory, but in practice this is a nightmare so all the users just want pre-compiled binaries, and pre-compiled binaries are always set up for x86. Furthermore a lot of software people actually use is legacy software, for which all they have is working executables and an installer executable, many such pieces of software have been long abandoned by their producers and source code for them may well have all been lost by the software's creators at this point. In short, for a laptop to be useful as an all round machine to most users, it must be able to run x86 compiled binaries. As a Linux user and a believer in the spirit of open-source and making-sure-one's-hardware-is-self-repairable-and-not-backdoored I can well get behind the idea of an open-source laptop, but or an open-source laptop to succeed it must support x86. If that means reverse engineering x86 before an open-source implementation can be made, then that is where such efforts need to start, without x86 support the good intentions of an open-source laptop project just cannot meet the practical needs of real users*.*yes one might note that Apple has gone away from x86 without losing "users", but Apple users are more like fashion consumers than real geeks. Apple having moved away from x86 isn't a relevant comparison, as the trendy wants of Apple buyers are very different than the technical needs among the type of people who would be interested in an open-source laptop as a real daily driver machine.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 12:31:25 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 19, 2024, 02:32:41 pmHere is my PineTab-V next to a MacBook.To answer your objections:- the keyboard / trackpad unit is quite rigid. Perhaps I would not want to use it on my lap, but on any firm surface it is fine- it's a little under standard key spacing, but the keys themselves are the same as on anything else these days- There is a wired plug&socket connection to the CPU/screen unit. The KB can be detached, but you would not normally do so, instead folding it behind the screen if you want to use it as a tablet.- there are no batteries in the KB/trackpad unit. It is powered by the tablet.Incidentally, I virtually always use a Microsoft 850 wireless keyboard and mouse on my desktop computers. That uses a dongle plugging into a USB port and, as far as I'm aware, looks to the OS the same as wired USB KB&mouse.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 12:48:20 am
content: Quote from: Infraviolet on March 19, 2024, 11:55:17 pmSpeak for yourself. I have never in my life owned an MS-DOS or Windows computer  and I've been using computers since 1980.QuoteBull shit.Go into any tech company where highly skilled programmers are allowed a choice of computer to use, and the vast majority choose Mac, especially if the provided machines are laptops as they typically are these days (with docking to large screen, KB, etc when you are at your desk).This was true at Mozilla in 2009. It was true in SiFive (RISC-V CPU designer) in 2019. It's true in FaceBook and Google.Employees at these companies aren't "real geeks"? Don't make me laugh. ok, I've owned a 24 core i9-13900HX Lenovo with Windows 11 for about the last two weeks and haven't yet gotten around to wiping that and putting Linux on it natively. But I plan to.

author: Infraviolet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 01:03:35 am
content: I've been on Linux with every computer I've used since 2017, nonetheless the majority of programs I use are precompiled x86 binaries.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 01:17:35 am
content: Quote from: Infraviolet on March 20, 2024, 01:03:35 amThe majority of programs I use on my arm32, arm64, and riscv64 Linux boards are also precompiled binaries. Binaries for Arm and RISC-V, not for x86, of course. "sudo apt install foo". Boom!

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 03:45:28 am
content: Quote from: Infraviolet on March 19, 2024, 11:55:17 pmThis too is a myth. Have you been to many Linux conferences? My first was RedHat Summit 2013. I thought I would be in the minority with my shiny new 2012 MacBook Pro, expecting most to be running Thinkpads with Linux. But was astonished that probably 75% of attendees, including the graybeards, and about 90% of Red Hat employees, were running MacBooks with RHEL in a VM. Macs are very common in the commercial geek world. I've been to several conferences since and the trend continues.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 04:31:56 am
content: Macs are also ubiquitous in the academic world.

author: Infraviolet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 05:12:57 am
content: "Macs are also ubiquitous in the academic world."From my observations that's more among humanities academics, and professors who've risen to such a seniority that they don't do any actual research any more but spend all their time forced in to administrative roles for their departments. That is to say, not the sort of academics who are actually doing much hands-on technical stuff.I'm surprised about your observation about Linux conferences though, seems pretty odd that Linux developers would prefer to have it in a VM than as their base operating system.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 01:08:42 pm
content: Quote from: Infraviolet on March 20, 2024, 01:03:35 amI've been on GNU/Linux with every computer I've used since 2005, the turning point, from BeOS-v5+netbone to GNU/Linux (kernel 2.4), on the occasion of the launch of the first beta version of Gentoo!Since then, from PowerPC-750 to POWER9, from PXA (intel ARM) to Ampere/ARM64, from MIPS-1 to MIPS32R2 (1), but also HPPA (2), nonetheless the majority of programs I use are locally - in house - compiled sources!When I was a student I compiled things on my laptop, or directly on the router; to compile OpenOffice on a PPC 750@400Mhz/64Mbyte ram took a week, and to compile a tool like "cmake" on an IDT MIPS32@400Mhz/64Mbyte ram took 98hours.Today I compile whole stage1-3-4s on Qemu/$arch instances created specifically for Catalyst; here I could improve the building system, as it's a cluster of two/three Mac-Mini intel 2009 ... a modern Xeon server would be insanely better.So I can say that it's just a matter of available computer-power, electricity and personal time (to learn stuff and maintain stuff), not only to compile things, but also to fix them, fix bugs, both in the code and in the ebuilds, or to create the ebuilds themselves, but supporting systems entirely opensource has been widely viable for ~20 years!.(1) this was/is *very* difficult to be supported a common rootfs, as everything, including critical parts, was/is experimental, therefore untested/bugged(2) this is *very* difficult (practically impossible?) to be supported for { llvm/clang, Go, Rust, GNAT, ... }

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 01:10:11 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 20, 2024, 01:17:35 amwhich kind of binaries?On my boss'sMac-Mini { PPC, intel } clusterAmpere serversIBM POWER workstations{ firmware, kernel, userspace, applications } are 100% OpenSource and/or things that we develop in houseLucky peopleOn the contrary, on my MacBook Air I only had commercial software, starting with FinalCut.In Teres-1 support, as far as I'm concerned, the firmware is uboot, the kernel is linux , the rootfs is based on Catalyst, therefore derived from Gentoo/ARM64, everything is 100% open source.On the kernel side, there's only the bad GPU issue, because turbofb doesn't work well yet, let's say it "somehow works" (closed hardware), then there's the OpenRISC issue, that little MPU that manages the "energy" matters of the SoC and that's a long and unclear story on Allwinner's part.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 01:14:59 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 20, 2024, 12:31:25 amok, you convinced me. I'll add it to the list above

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2024, 01:25:19 pm
content: Quote from: Infraviolet on March 19, 2024, 11:55:17 pmUmm, yup, that's a problem for things like SolidWorks and Avocet compilers.We solved it in two waysfor things like SolidWorks: by purchasing an Intel rack server, with integrated KVM. Xen runs Virtual machines, one for every Windows work environment. Applications can also be used via RDPfor things like Avocet (DOS) compilers: by hacking DosBox for those DOS compilers that were CLI compiled.DosBox acts as a bridge between the host machine and its filesystem <--> DOS16 filesystem, and between conio <--> tty;It works very well, and compared toWineit also works on non-x86 hosts. Obviously it has major limitations, but that's how I moved most DOS compilers to the { Ampere, POWER } servers

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2024, 04:19:14 pm
content: Dunno anything about the Chinese-~MIPS64(1) laptops ...(1) ~MIPS64 are not 100% MIPS64-ISA compliant.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 04:42:08 am
content: Video (not my channel, not affilated) "Unboxing RISC-V Lichee Console 4A"Note, when you boot the kernel, the /dev/tty console is not rotated, so you have to twist your neckThis can be fixed in x11 by rotating the display via software, but that's "no-good" in product design

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 09:13:48 am
content: This is very hard to avoid if you're not a huge manufacturer, as virtually all such small displays are made for portrait mode devices these days. If it bothers you, set it to not display the boot messages.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 11:08:35 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 24, 2024, 09:13:48 amwell, I ordered just last week six 10.1" LCDs, besides being 4:3 with a classic LVDS interface they don't have that problem.It took me two years to find them (paid 60 euro each), but so that they exist -made in 2012- says the label stuck on the back.Rather ... the issue is, they use neon lamp (umm typical early 2000s technology here), so they need inverter. This is the only problem, as long as I haven't yet understood how to do it (if it can be done) to make LED-backlighting.This not only removes a ~pound of weight, but saves energy, making the final device more power efficient.Quote from: brucehoult on March 24, 2024, 09:13:48 amI cannot solve the problem by moving the { firmware, kernel } console to the serial as I'm one of those who does not use x11 but only text console, so for me this is something that can't be solved in any way. Exceptfbcondirectly on /dev/fb0"fbcon" (framebuffer console) is one of my experimental things that does not require X11 to operate, but umm it's not fast, it's rather slow (worse still, software scolling ... d'oh), so ... decent but not brilliant.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 12:15:07 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 24, 2024, 04:42:08 amBoth uboot and fbcon support console rotation, and adding it to other drivers is not too difficult.This reviewincludeda bootlog, which indicatesthis verisilicon drm driver (vs-drm)is used, and it does support rotation, but as of kernel 6.8, has not been included in the vanilla kernel yet. The latest version of the patchset isv3, butKeith Zhao of StarFiveTechis still working on it to get it into upstreamable state.Quote from: brucehoult on March 24, 2024, 09:13:48 amNo. The memory orientation of the display device is irrelevant nowadays. This is standard systems integration work, and only requires the driver to expose the initial orientation as a module parameter. Even thefbtft driver in stagingsupportsrotatefirmware parameter. If you cannot stuff it in the graphics firmware (because it varies at run time), then push a couple of lines' patch upstream to expose it also as amodule_param(), so it can be set by uboot etc. on the kernel command line overriding the one in the firmware.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 12:37:02 pm
content: Good to know. I do bare metal stuff (including setting up PMP, page tables, switching modes etc) and I do compilers/JITs/emulators in user-land, but Linux boot and kernel stuff is somewhere I don't venture.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 01:11:45 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 24, 2024, 12:15:07 pmnice to learnwith "fbcon" I meant a userprogram I wrote myself (kernel v2.6.39 era, many years ago), but it's userspace stuff that access /dev/fb0 to manage a tty terminal with simple features, and only one 8x16 font-set.Everything is software-driven, even the vertical scroll.Pros: it works everywhere (even on NetBSD, OpenBSD, and XINU) there is a /dev/fb0Cons: slow

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 01:27:17 pm
content: Ordered two devices for my friends (their money on my credit-card)395.00 €, PINETAB2-10.1-inc 8GB/128GB ARM based tablet with detachable backlit keyboard395.00 €, PINEBOOK-14-inc Pro ARM based laptop000.00 €, Shipping----------------------------------------------------------------------790.00 €, totalI'll move forward with the teres-1. Maybe I'll buy a RISC-V device in the second semester.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 02:11:13 pm
content: one thing I do find annoying is when a product that is supposed to be for developers has the "unique feature" to multiplex audio port between audio headphone output and serial console debug.you need a program in userspace to move a bloody GPIO in early-boot.Code:#!/bin/bashUENV_PATH="/boot/uEnv.txt"case $1 inon) sed -i.bak '/debug=/c\debug=on' $UENV_PATHecho "Debug on headphone port enabled. Please reboot !";;off) sed -i.bak '/debug=/c\debug=off' $UENV_PATHecho "Debug on headphone port disabled. Please reboot !";;*)echo "Unknown option! Usage: debug_switch on|off "esacWhy hasn't u-boot been modified to provide this service?Why open source is always missing essential things (like a debugging console) and you always end up angry with tons of hacks?!?How am I going to manage this?- open the laptop- remove the motherboard- find the GPIO- unsolder the contact- wire an hardware patch (pullup/down I have to check) to make the serial perpetually enabled

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 02:33:55 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 24, 2024, 12:37:02 pmRighty-o; I tend to spend more time there than I do on bare metal (except for microcontrollers) myself.Quote from: DiTBho on March 24, 2024, 02:11:13 pmBecause systems integration is ignored, done by whoever has the time or interest with minimum time and effort spent.I'm very serious about that. It's the kind of field where you need a generalist to get it done right, with enough experience to know the various ways how it can be done right. By the time you have that kind of expertise and experience, you're way out of the pay range anyone is willing to pay to get it done right. (Granted, the maximum pay range for this is somewhere between highschool dropout and McDonalds worker, but "free" being preferred.)It is exactly why I keep telling anyone messing with Linux to consider looking at LinuxFromScratch and writing their own example init systems, as that gives a vast majority of the experience needed. Add a bit of kernel hacking and patch submission, and you're basically there, in my opinion.Quote from: DiTBho on March 24, 2024, 02:11:13 pmSince it uses u-boot, I would use thegpio commandinstead. If not supported on this hardware yet, then I would look into a patch implementing it, and pushing it upstream.This, too, is something that should have been done by the systems integrator who put the example/default images together, being low-lying fruit and all.Unfortunately, minimizing time to market no matter how un-integrated or incomplete the device is, is the primary goal nowadays.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 03:32:12 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 24, 2024, 02:33:55 pmyup, doesn't seem implemented yet (2024 Git).U-boot has a lot of bugs here and there and I have to fix them with higher priority.Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 24, 2024, 02:33:55 pmbah, the Teres-1 is a product made in 2018, six years ago, still for sale for ~250-300 euro shipped with all the tools you need, which is not "cheap", especially compared to alternatives.You have to ignore that- the SD card release mechanism is so clunky and poorly designed that it often gets stuck and you need a screwdriver to insert or remove the SD card(risking splitting it, scratching the shell, or doing other damages)- the eMMC is very slow. It's a known issue, and there are plans to replace it with faster units, but they are in perpetual limbo- there are no other USB ports, you only have *one* on the left side of the laptop.- the SoC's network NIC is shared in a mutually exclusive way with the LCD, so either you have the LCD, or do you have the network NIC- the serial port is shared with the sound card without having put a physical switch on the mobo.At least take care of the basic things... instead... it's semi-abandoned, kept going by very few volunteersAnd look what you find pre-installedCode:# uname -r3.10.104kernel v3here is why I ***HATE*** everything made by Allwinner: because they release kernels in a partial way, they don't fully respect licenses, and what they release doesn't follow the standard lines, so then it takes years to take the things they do, to clean and to fix them, and bring them mainstream.Code:void export_gpio(int gpio){int fd;char buf;fd = open("/sys/class/gpio/export", O_WRONLY);sprintf(buf, "%d", gpio);write(fd, buf, strlen(buf));close(fd);sprintf(buf, "/sys/class/gpio/gpio%d/direction", gpio);fd = open(buf, O_WRONLY);write(fd, "out", 3);close(fd);}The provided tool to "enable the debug port" is ok for kernel v3, but it's deprecated stuff since kernel v5, so this stuff won't even workI will try to fix u-boot, but not now. Now I need the serial console, and it has to work without having to depend on other matters.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 06:32:19 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 24, 2024, 03:32:12 pmLike I said, systems integration is just not something that vendors (including Olimex) or users care about. It is like proper security: if it is not done from the get go, it will never be implemented, because you cannot just "add on" that stuff afterwards.Physical limitations and bugs are a separate thing.Quote from: DiTBho on March 24, 2024, 03:32:12 pmDon't you go there too: systems integration is just as important as choosing proper hardware for the task!There is no "basic things first" in this type of hardware; it is eitherall of it at acceptable quality(including systems integration), or it is crappy.(My criterion is: A tool that makes you frustrated every time you use it is a crappy tool.)That said, I keep away from Allwinner hardware exactly because it is crappy. It works for those who are satisfied with the Raspberry Pi class hardware (including dropping USB packets without notifying anything, breaking just about all protocols, because doing itcorrectlyis too hard; instead, they just make itrare enoughin software). Suitable for hacks and one-offs, but not for an everyday tool.I believe it is very informative to checklinux-kernelanddevicetreelists if support has been submitted to upstream kernels and if it has, by whom. You'll find which SoC vendors do development and maintenance work with/for board manufacturers, which SoC developers push support into kernels concurrently or prior to boards relying on said support becoming available, and so on. The discussions and reactions to the patches are more important than the code submitted, because those who are just doing their job and don't actually care, just dump the code and vanish. (Or demand and whine that the code must be accepted upstream as-is, and other people will take the reigns over for maintaining it and bringing it up to spec.)That way you also findinteresting details, like how closelyBeagleV Aheadmatches the LicheePi 4A, so for any LicheePi U-Boot issues, theBeagleV-Ahead U-BootGithub tree ought to be very interesting.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2024, 08:27:45 pm
content: (the dts is another problem to solve, because there are missing parts and wrong parametersUmm. Sooner or later I will fix everything, I am not willing to give-up!Just ... just found that even the power connector needs a reworking after 1000 cyclesFsk#_#&*@#$ crappy hw!)

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 25, 2024, 09:46:53 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 24, 2024, 06:32:19 pmumm, I don't entirely agree.That way of thinking is for a product that could very well be an Apple Book Air. In that case, a company like Apple has all the internal and external resources to curate a "laptop" product that arrives "ready" for the end user.In the case of Olimex the "product" is a "kit", which arrives in the form of a box of components to assemble, therefore it's not even the "kit" of a "finished laptop" but rather of a "laptop in development", that is, a "development board inserted into the shell of a laptop computer".In 2018 they promised several interchangeable motherboards, that is, the possibility of choosing what to install inside the laptop chassis. However, in reality there is only one choice: that's is Allwinner A64 SoC! So, it wasn't my choice to use an Allwinner SoC in the teres1.I would have preferred to avoid it, because I worked with Neo SBCs, which are based on their 32-bit ARM SoC. The Teres-1 uses a 64-bit ARM SoC, supposed to be better, and in practice at least the OpenRISC MPU doesn't have any of the hw-buggs found in the Neo' SoC, anyway I found it in use with the Olimex's laptop, I had no choice here (except buy/not to buy), and when you participate "in the third row" - that is, as a spectator sitting outside the company - in the development of a product (because so it's advertized), well... what you expect is to have purchased a development board as a "product", rather than an object to "hack".Anyway, as "develoment platform" sold as "product", there are basic things first. One of them is to provide a serial console without the need of hacking anything!This is what pissed me off yesterday: that no one has bothered to fix the matter yet, and this wastes a lot of time, to the point of discouraging potential people willing to lend a hand and help.-For the next gen, the Teres-v2, I advised against using an Allwinner SoC again.hereyou will find the reasons in favor of one of the designers of the next version.I hope they don't

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 25, 2024, 03:21:42 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 25, 2024, 09:46:53 amDoesn't matter. If systems integration is not done from the get go, it will never get done. It is like security, which has to be baked in to the design, and cannot be effectively added on top later. By hoping that "do the basic stuff first", you areeffectivelysaying I'll acceptthislevel of annoyance from my tools.To me, tools that annoy me are not worth using. It is that simple.Quote from: DiTBho on March 25, 2024, 09:46:53 amBut it was your choice to buy one anyway. I've looked at Teres, too, and chose not to buy it exactly because of the level of annoyance I knew would ensue from Allwinner SoCs, no matter how good work Olimex otherwise does.For reference, see linux-sunxi projectGPL violations,A64, andLinux mainlining effortpages.The best way to describe Allwinner is not "evil" or "coldly calculating"; it is "inept".Quote from: DiTBho on March 25, 2024, 09:46:53 amIs it? Someone else might say the basic thing first is to have the hardware (including display) boot a linux kernel properly. Kernel hackers say the basic thing is to get the thing to boot into first-stage bootloader with memory and buses in a stable state. Bootloader hackers say getting memory and buses to a stable state is the basic thing, with the rest to be developed "by the community".See? There is no "basic things first". You can alwaysdefineone that suits your context, but you cannot expect anyone else, especially a vendor like Olimex to agree to your exact definition, so it is meaningless. It is exactly analogous to how "best" always depends on the context, and is basically useless as a qualifier or specifier. To vendors, "basic things first" isalwaysthe minimum that is needed to get people to buy the product. By your act of buying it, you have accepted the definition from Olimex as to what is sufficient –– assuming we agree you weren't deceived by the description and documentation, only frustrated by the lack of progress in the last five years or more.Some time ago, I boughtOx64 from Pine64, the maker of PineTab and PineNote tablets and PineBook and PineBook Pro laptops. Ox64 is a Bouffalo Labs BL808 SBC in microcontroller form factor, and is specifically marketed as a development platform for actual devices, similarly how Teres is specifically marketed as a "DIY laptop" (with a pretty prominent "Intended for use for ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT, DEMONSTRATION OR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY and is not considered by OLIMEX Ltd to be finished end-product fit for general consumer use" note).I would never recommend Ox64 for anyone wanting a Linux SBC for anything except than developing their own SBC variant based on BL808 (possibly for a specific purpose having strict size constraints), or to be used as a microcontroller/RTOS devkit, or perhaps as a test platform to learn to do systems integration on. It is very much the SBC analog of the Teres-1 laptop.Quote from: DiTBho on March 25, 2024, 09:46:53 amI bet quite a few of those who have bought a Teres have fixed it, but haven't bothered to push the changes upstream, keeping them in their own local repositories because it suffices for their "basic needs". You know, "basic things first". To them, pushing the fixes upstream is something to be done at a later time when they have the spare time and sufficient inclination, because it does not belong totheir"basic things first" definition.What you are railing against, is that others do not have the same priorities as you do, and this is hinderingyourprogress. Unless you try hard to pushyourchanges upstream, you really don't have a leg to stand on in requiring others to push their changes upstream either.Aside from a couple of really-cheap SBCs I bought more for the price than anything, I do not use Allwinner SoCs. I like Rockchip, Samsung, and TI SoCs because the designer/vendor themselves push the support into the core packages; and Amlogic because ofLinux-Meson(not affiliated with Amlogic) andBayLibre(doing a good job adding more mainline support). Rockchip in particular is making a real difference in the Linux kernel support of their designs. (I haven't checked U-Boot support state, though.)I'm giving you hard pushback here, becausethis will happen again and again: it is a human social issue, and not a technical one. It will not change, because there is nothing to drive such a change; people will do what they do, and not contribute, because they think someone else will do it anyway so it would be waste of effort for themselves to do so. The only thing we can do to change it, is change our own behaviour first, and then by example show exactly why behaving this way saves time/money/effort and is therefore the more effective/efficient way to do things –– and obviously to spend money only on products whose manufacturers and vendors are doing the right thing. Anything else is just complaining about humans being humans (which I admit,iscathartic, but otherwise not useful unless a better behaviour patternthat benefits themselves too, and not just ourselves, is well known; but even then, we have to do it first ourselves).Icannot expect "better" support from Pine64 or Olimex than what I can already see before I buy anything, because doing so is unreasonable. For better support, I can only either join or start a new community showing how pooling our efforts will benefit everyone in the community. And, if I do not intend any long-term commitment, how could I expect that from anyone else? Even the vendor has already been paid. It would be unrealistic.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2024, 08:24:26 am
content: about "social issues" ... next stop will likely be people on { Youtube, TikTok, ... } telling not only retro computing enthusiasts but also open hardware laptops enthusiasts are all "masochist"( Jeff ... did it)

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2024, 02:35:13 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 26, 2024, 08:24:26 amThey say the same thing about people who only use hand tools for woodworking, drive single-gear bicycles, enjoy jigsaw puzzles, and so on. When they don't personally see or feel the immediate reward, it is easier to resort to irrational beliefs than actually think it through. Just consider how large a fraction of archaeological objects are classified as "religious artefacts", just because nobody has bothered to think or examine if they have a practical purpose. It is the easiest way to avoid thinking it through, that's all.I was thinking more about how difficult it is for us humans to see the bigger picture and to choose the behavioural patterns that maximizes reward over time, compared to ones that bring minimal but immediate rewards. (In psychology, this is calleddelayed gratification, and is difficult to develop in the world of gamified social media where tiny immediate rewards are all that matter.)The main reason I push back so hard and try to explain/push these things is that this (with respect to Linux, at least) is a rare case where even a single individual can make a big difference. Everyone knows about Linus, but my favourite example is Greg Kroah-Hartman, who still helps out-of-tree developers (especially commercial vendors) upstream the support for their devices. Plus all the stable andlinux-cve-announcestuff he does.In the embedded world, it means that a single voice pointing out how using Allwinner SoCs gives you lower initial cost but huge maintenance/development debt, compared to Intel/AMD/Rockchip/Samsung/Texas Instruments/Amlogic et cetera that may have higher initial cost but much less debt (systems integrationmustbe considered such a debt, although volunteers can help if you can offer the beta devices at lower prices), can help others realize this, leading to companies shifting their cost calculations from initial to lifetime (at least a little bit! I'm notthatmuch of an optimist), and that should lead to future Linux-compatible hardware becoming cheaper to maintainand develop.I hope you and others see my logic here, and my positive/supportive intent at the root of my pushback/ranting.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2024, 08:21:02 pm
content: this is the other Jeff. His video is... hilarious since he's collecting old Macs

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2024, 08:30:35 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 26, 2024, 02:35:13 pmYou are always welcomeI would love to have your convincing argumentative skills.I simply suggested avoiding Allwinner for Teres-v2, mentioning the terrible experience I had with their 32-bit SoCs on Neo SBCs.This is what the community lead developer of Teres-2 replied (in public):QuoteAnother problem came up while reading some pdf: the at the moment the Teres-v1 rev 1.5 (motherboard revC) has 2GB of soldered RAM, if you want to increase it... well, the Allwinner A64 SoC doesn't address more than 3GB... that's another hw problem and/or a strong argument to convince them to avoid A64 for the next generation

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2024, 09:32:20 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 26, 2024, 08:21:02 pmYeah, nice clickbaity title. I don't even blame, that's just the game.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2024, 10:24:05 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 26, 2024, 08:21:02 pmAhh .. young Yearling. Is that his dad?(I'm led to believe his name is András István Arató ... but there is a resemblance! And the guy is an EE IRL)

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2024, 11:41:02 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 26, 2024, 10:24:05 pmI haven't watched enough of his video to know these details.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2024, 12:04:39 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 26, 2024, 09:32:20 pmYup, part of the Youtube game.Even when he installs ram-sticks which are NOT supported, and then complains that the mac doesn't work.Or when he says he wants to relive the emotion of the Mac of the time (2002), and then he installs SSD.RoFTLOh, but how I would like a Sonnet Tempo s/ATA PCI64/PCI-X HBA ...(and a s/ATA port inside the teres1 ... )

author: langwadt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2024, 08:35:10 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 25, 2024, 09:46:53 amdoes making it a "kit" avoid the paperwork of getting approvals?

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2024, 10:32:16 pm
content: I'm not too much into vintage computing myself (I mean, in an active manner), but the last related thing I did a couple years ago was to revive a Sinclair QL, a modest, yet much rarer beast than any Macintosh.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2024, 12:05:22 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 28, 2024, 10:32:16 pmAhh, an 8 bit computer :-) :-)

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2024, 01:52:04 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 29, 2024, 12:05:22 amSort of... not.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2024, 01:01:34 pm
content: Quote from: langwadt on March 28, 2024, 08:35:10 pm90% so it seems

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2024, 01:50:30 pm
content: Quotesomeone understood me, and liked my comment

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2024, 02:46:16 pm
content: QuoteThis is one of the public responses, which explain the reasons for the choices made.I'm a bit perplexed, because it seems like it's always the same problem regarding software development, documentation, etc

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2024, 09:53:18 am
content: Called "cyberdeck" to play the usual clickbait game on YouTube, it's rather a RISC-V mini (dev?) laptop.He said "very slow". Umm, well it's faster than my japanese PDA with an Intel PXA ARM@400Mhz.It's rather the keyboard that sucks!

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2024, 03:49:52 pm
content: This one, built in 2010, should make more sense if rebuilt in 2024 with RISC-VAnyway, I need a damn GeeThree Serial Port for my Power Macintosh G4.As I am going to remove the graphic card.Code:macmini2-intel /mnt/disk3/src/machine/platform/powerpc/PowerMacG4/mdd/kernel/kernel-6.6.16-ppc-PowerMac-mdd-2xG4 # ./mybuild-2024 2 compilingkernel-6.6.16(powerpc/powermac-mdd-2xG4)note: experimental, SMP, Zserialtoolchain(powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu:2.34.0/9.3.0)-----------------------------------------------checking myhost as qualified_host ... successchecking .config ... success-----------------------------------------------gadget_to_do(build) ... overlay/buildcleaning ................ donegadget_to_do(clean) ... kernel/cleanapp_machine=PPC7455-PowerMac-MDD-SMP, server-profile-250Hzbuilding kernel ...but that stuff is so rare that when it appears on eBay it is listed for 300 euros

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2024, 06:18:36 pm
content: If one searches forrk3399or3566in development mailing list subjects, it is true that many patches are submitted by others, but there are @rockchip.com devs there too, both submitting and reviewing patches. So, I don't agree with kreyren's assessment, especially if one compares to Allwinner (provides nothing). Intel and AMD have more developers working for them, being much bigger companies, but relatively speaking, I'm pretty happy Rockchip provides the developer support it does. Even more would help, of course.Having a nice keyboard and a nice IPS or similar display with wide viewing angles and preferably no dead pixels, seems very difficult in the laptop land. Even the big manufacturers often fail in this.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 04:42:11 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 30, 2024, 09:53:18 amYearling is almost as much of an Arm (and Pi) bigot as Dr TechTechPotato (did you know he's got an advanced degree? Like half the people in the tech world don't). It's sooo slow because it's about the same as an ancient Pi 4. As if that wasn't the fastest Pi only half a year ago.The C910 even has the RISC-V equivalent of SVE2, which no Arm SBC has -- pre-ratification draft 0.7.1 of the V extension, which is just now starting to get proper software support, with GCC14 supporting both 0.7.1 (renamed to XTheadVector) which is in a couple of billion devices, and also RVV 1.0, which is right now only available (at least in SBCs) on one board, the CanMV-K230 with a single core CPU and 0.5 GB RAM.The problem is not the hardware  but that it takes time for new hardware to get good quality support upstreamed. TH1520 boards have only been out since July or so. The Pi 4 also took a couple of years to get decent support.Heck -- it took six or seven years before the 64 bit Pi 3 got an offically-supported 64 bit OS! of course it's not as fast as the new hotness RK3588 boards in the Arm world, such as that Pi 5 that came out half a year ago (but is unobtanium) or the Rock 5 and Orange Pi 5 which have been out a year or two. RISC-V boards faster than RK3588 are due out towards the end of the year.

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 04:52:57 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 31, 2024, 04:42:11 amPi 5's have been obtainable for awhile now. I just picked up another (8GB) last week when I stopped by MicroCenter here in the states. Pishop.us, where I normally buy them online, also has them in stock. If you're not able to find them, it must be a regional thing.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 05:16:49 am
content: Quote from: Veteran68 on March 31, 2024, 04:52:57 amMine arrived in late November (ordered in September). I'm just reporting what I (still) read on the interwebs.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 05:41:23 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 30, 2024, 06:18:36 pmI do not know. I don't understand that kreyren dude too much, and I have no other official/unofficial answers from Olimex.It seems that the interest is close to zero, and worse still, I expected much more participation from people who develop rather than people who come to me in private and ask - "what distro do you install?" - rather than - "what patch do you use/did you write and apply to fix that issue?".As an added value for the choice of a specific Allwinner SoC, Specter&C non-vulnerabilities were mentioned three times, which... makes no sense for me

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 05:50:17 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 30, 2024, 06:18:36 pmif we look at my Japanese handheld, it's even smaller than a mini-laptop, the keys on the keyboard are noticeably smaller, and are of the same type as those used in pocket calculators, I have been using it daily for 10 years and I can assure you that they are much less annoying to use than those of some mini-laptops.Here they actually took the body of a 2010 product designed for Intel Atom, replaced the motherboard with something RISC_V, and reused the keyboard and then the LCD display from a tablet.Not that it's absolutely wrong, it saves a lot of engineering hours, but for me it's wrong not to take care of primary details like the keyboard!In fact in the comments below the video, as expected, it is pointed out that that keyboard is very uncomfortable for using the mini-laptop as an ssh network console.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 06:30:18 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 31, 2024, 04:42:11 amA "bigot" is a person who is obstinately and/or unreasonably attached to { belief, opinion, faction } especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.Jeff ... umm, I think he simply makes videos for money, and has sponsors who pay him and send him hardware, so he deliberately acts as an influencer with/for RPI/ARMQuote from: brucehoult on March 31, 2024, 04:42:11 amIn the case of a laptop, you must also consider that it is not enough to "throw an SBC into the shell reused from a previous product", especially if the shell comes from a product that was hastily engineered at the time.That is, the point is: we don't have fast hardware because we don't have mature upstream support yet. Ok, I understand, but then if we design motherboards with interchangeable SoM modules precisely to give the possibility of making upgrades without having to change the entire laptop, then... let's start by designing the frame, the keyboard, the trackpad, and the screen, and make them brilliant instead of poor!It seems strange, but NO ONE is doing it!

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 08:44:29 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 31, 2024, 06:30:18 amWell, yes, it's hard to say if it's true belief or financially-influenced. Either way .. let's say less than objective.Historically I love Arm stuff. I was playing with Archimedes in the 80s, hacking Newtons in the 90s, professionally programming ARM7TDMI in BREW phones in the mid 2000s, followed by jailbreaking and porting our BREW software to iPhone as soon as they came out (I mean weeks). I own almost every Pi ever made (I seem to be the only person with an A7 Pi 2, not A53, because I ordered one the day they were announced). I even love my Arm-based Mac.But I think I can be a lot more objective about where RISC-V is at right now, and how fast it is catching up.QuoteYou may have missed the $1500 DC-Roma, which is designed for interchangeable SoM CPU modules, but with (presumably) higher quality components around it.The problem is if people don't want to pay $400 for Pi 3 - Pi 4 performance then they certainly don't want to pay $1500! For that money I just bought a 5.4 GHz (turbo) 24 core x86 laptop with ... well ... fairly good quality components.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 01:07:52 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on March 31, 2024, 08:44:29 amwell, theDC-Romais kind of legendary dogma for me ...I opened the topic precisely because the 12 months of the announcement have expired and no one has published a Video on Youtube or a review yet.You stated that some of your colleagues received the laptop, and I edited the topic, because otherwise I would think that it was never made, and this is what we also read onReddit(1y ago).For reasons that I don't understand well, Google didn't findthisarticle, with much more recent information.However, it is not necessary to make a case in magnesium, titanium or aluminium, all complex things, therefore expensive for small productions, and impossible (especially titanium, I have a fair amount of experience with ti-frames for bicycles) to manage without specific equipment.Ania still studies atTallinn University of Technology, but she designed and created the shell of a vt220 terminal in laptop-shape using laser cutting of PVC sheets, to be glued, and mounted with m3 support screws, and to be sanded with sandpaper, and painted with pantograph (she likes green paints), and a HHKB/Lite (the cheapest, with arrow keys) for keyboard..., a trackpoint disassembled from a Thinkpad keyboard and for LCD a 1024x768 VGA module with neon backlight.It's all one solid block once assembled - "as thick as a brick" - so she uses to say, laughing, but it has just enough space to hold the HHKB kb, which is very thick but also high quality, and all the electronics comfortably.She focused on the five things that matter- battery, refillable styluses- LCD, 4:3, 14"- quality keyboard and trackpoint <--- got as second hand, 60 euro both- space for housing the process module and enough airflow for its integrated heat-shield- cost < 300 euroI believepeople with industrial design skills can even do better than this! Rather than taking some crappy Chinese shells and reuse them.Which both Olimex and Lichee also did, and if you take a sample of 10 people, 8 complain about it, because, talking about the Teres1, I can assure you that it really sucks as keyboard and touchpad.And, worst of all, neither company has plans to give the possibility to upgrade (not even with a second purchasable upgrade-premium-kit), meaning no one in the internal engineering departments cares about it, as they believe it's the community has to solve the problem!In fact, if Ania used a laser cutting machine provied by her university, you read comments from people who wonder how to 3D print a new case, given that 500 euro hobby printers don't have enough printing area, and few, very few have C02 lasers for cutting other materials, and even fewer users have CNCs at home.In short... the problem is precisely the attitude: selling "products", telling the various communities, for everything, starting from firmware, kernel, userspace, and mechanics, "now make do"

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 08:19:19 pm
content: 2010, MIPS laptop ...

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 08:37:09 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 31, 2024, 05:50:17 amYep. It is rather telling that on the laptop I'm typing this (HP EliteBook i840 G4, ~ 6 years old) I'm on my third keyboard already, and have a fourth one ready for when I get annoyed enough by the current one. (I only destroyed one accidentally with hot tea with milk and honey, the rest by typing.) Second battery, too: first one puffed up enough to twist the plastic shell, shearing one self-tapping screw (the plastic surrounding the screw, not the metal screw, of course).When I use standard keyboards, I take them apart and wash the washable parts every six months or so, because imperfect response annoys me more than having to disassemble, clean, vacuum, wash, and assemble them. Same with HID mice.Quote from: DiTBho on March 31, 2024, 05:50:17 amFor me, the keyboard and the display (viewing angles, performance with low-intensity backlight, no flicker, no dead pixels if at all possible) are the most important thing in any laptop or minilaptop.The second most important thing is whether I can maintain, debug, and fix issues I may encounter with it. I am even willing to use closed-source binary blob drivers via dkms (i.e., with a C shim, so one can relink it for custom kernels) for better subsystem performance, if I can use open source drivers for degraded performance when debugging and fixing kernel-level issues. I prefer not to, but I will if the device otherwise suits me.I haven't had a computer yet I could not tweak to better fit my use cases and workflow, so I fully expect and require to be able to do so in the future too.Third most important thing is connectivity. I want a couple of USB ports, a gigabit ethernet, and a headphone jack at minimum.Fourth most important thing is accelerated hardware decoding for standard video formats up to 1080p, because I don't want the device to get too hot when I watch a Youtube video.Stuff like CPU speed, amount of RAM, storage speed, et cetera only come after. I was quite productive with an early Linux minilatop fifteen years ago, so I know what I need, and how to overcome limitations posed by limited resources. Stuff like battery capacity and longevity is more complicated: an unreplaceable battery (glued or component-twinned, no OEM replacements available) is a strict no-no regardless of capacity, but if easily replaced (modular) and I could have one or two spares, I might accept even quite low capacity. I don't care much about the weight, either.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 08:51:36 pm
content: ... something ingenious that drove me crazy: Ania designed a keyboard for a laser pantograph, designed all the silkscreening of the QWERTY keys, US layout, then used the laser pantograph in her university lab to cut things on a thin sheet of balsa wood.This way, she made wooden key-caps for the keyboard keys, which he then glued onto each key. Damn, I tried it today – 200% better improvement!!! Both immediately to the touch and in complete comfort after 2 hours of useNow I want a laptop with wooden key-caps!!!

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 09:29:21 pm
content: That is one of the biggest reasons I like woodworking: the feel of wood, and wood-like plants like bamboo, is superior to plastics and metals.My favourite one is Nordic birch (specificallybetula pendulaandbetula pubescens) treated with beeswax and food-grade mineral oil mix (often called "salad bowl mix"), or just food-grade mineral oil. (Use walnut oil or similar, if you want to tint it a bit; it is very pale wood.) The tactile feel is superb, and by controlling the smoothness (the grit to which you sand it before oiling and waxing) you can vary it. If it gets damaged, just sand it and re-treat.Balsa has a specific tactile feeling too, and being so lightweight, will not add, uh, inertia? weight? to the keys, so I'm not at all surprised they yield excellent keycap tops. Because balsa is a "porous" softwood, she should consider using mineral oil, beeswax, or a mix to make the tops cleanable (with a damp cloth). Human fingers do emit oils anyway. Test with a test piece first and let sit for a few days to find out how the finish affects the look and feel.(Also: you can get an even slightly better feel by sanding the top so that it is very slightly concave, vertically, with left and right sides coming up higher than the center. I dislike the dimples in F and J keys, but like the top concavity a lot myself, because I often "rest" my fingers on top of the keys; it's more comfortable to me. You can do the sanding using a wooden dowel wrapped with sandpaper after cutting, or making the tops in vertical strips and routing the concave part before cutting the strip off a wider block before laser engraving.)

author: audiotubes
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 09:32:47 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 22, 2024, 04:19:14 pmThe Loongson MIPS implementation is a superset of MIPS64 if I remember correctly. I doubt that anyone would ever notice the difference except if you're writing MIPS assembly and even then probably not very much.I don't have the laptop and haven't seen one, but I have two Loongson Fuloong boxes which are almost paperback book sized boxes that are good, silent, very low power consumption boxes quite nice for server use. Been running OpenBSD on them for about 10 years I think. One is an ftp server, the other is an emulation host for SIMH VAX.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2024, 10:06:38 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 31, 2024, 01:07:52 pmNot everyone makes videos on everything they buy. I don't, for example. Youtube videos are an unreliable way of checking if something exists, especially things neither kids nor rich conspicuous consumers (who have the same motives) will be buying. But I found this in five seconds:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IaZJNqG_nloQuoteOne ex-colleague, Krste, was given one at a conference in August or September. Others in /r/risc-v preordered them like normal people and received them in ... I don't remember ... October or November?QuoteThat was a year ago. They indeed had not shipped then. They shipped half a year ago.Tech products, unfortunately, often don't hit their previously announced shipping dates. My confidence levels were low on this one, mostly due to their bullshit marketing materials talking about crypto or something. But they did ship, and only a few months after various JH7110 and TH1520 SBCs shipped. They were apparently planning versions with both those SoC (TH1520 as "pro") but that hasn't been seen yet and may have been a retro-fitted plan as the TH1520 was the only one mentioned in late 2022, but JH7110 is what people have received.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2024, 01:34:55 am
content: Quote

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2024, 05:19:49 am
content: Umm theGdium Liberty 1000laptop (Loongson-2F)Reading at areview, it doesn't look so good(~400 euro + S/H + importing fees, from Alixexpress/China)Pros+Free Firmware+Decent keyboardCons-Poor touchpad-Sluggish performance-Short battery life <-------------- this is a serious problem!-Chassis gets hot <---------------- combined with this!

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2024, 06:29:13 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 01, 2024, 01:34:55 amDid you know that Apple was secretly working on a "i-Car"?A failed project that couldn't be more failed, in that case they were right not to let anyone know anythingLOL

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2024, 06:56:15 am
content: Quote from: audiotubes on March 31, 2024, 09:32:47 pmThe history of theLoongsonis very controversial.Loongson's CPUs relied on various types of the company's LoongISA architecture { v1, v2, v3, ... } as - time by time - custom subset of the MIPS64 architecture. Such a tactic - somehow - enabled the company to preserve compatibility with programs designed for MIPS64 while bringing in its own extensions to improve performance in contemporary applications.The problem is that "somehow" ...Who? What?I have a terrible habit of collecting prototypes and weird computers when people get bored and parking them on eBay, or when they threaten to crush them in a hydraulic press.I took the plane and flew to Sweden to collect in person a brand-new HPPA C3750 Workstation, left in a company's warehouse. The new owners weren't willing to pack it because it's heavy (30Kg) and the original HP parcel is very big (the packaging includes approximately 40 cm of polystyrene all around a full tower chassis), so they put up an advert, not very descriptive because they didn't have the faintest idea what that computer was, but they put up photos of the box, still closed with the HP seals!Likewise I recovered an IDT prototype of one of the very first evaluation boards (therefore with profiling and debugger heads) of a MIPS R2K! Note that all commercial applications (including the SONY Playstation1) used R3K!Worse yet, I have a 2006 "Godson" Eval SBC(2). A card with very little stuff on it. CPU, RAM, Ethernet, and a lon that lacks those special unaligned load/store instructions that almost never serve any purpose, except when you have a misaligned address.It's not MIPS64 but rather MIPSIII/64bit , and wasn't even supposed to come out of China, and actually remained in China until 2010, when about the same thing happened as what happened with the HP workstation (what money can do ... and I offered only 200 euro for that thing), and so, somehow it landed on my table .It's an early implementation, and lacks the unaligned load-store instructions patented by MIPS Technologies.It's not a problem, something like this, for different reasons, I encountered it on the MIPS4 used by SGI on Indigo2 systems, and thesolutionworkaround is very simple: the missing instructions can be emulated by other instructions, just ... either you patch the machine layer of Gcc, or ...Code:mips-gcc -c -S hAllo.c -o hAllo.s1mips-fix hAllo.s1 hAllo.s # intercept the assembly it generates, and replace those missing instructionsmips-as hAllo.s -o hAllo.oUgly, but it somehow works for those bloodyMIPS-likechips2001-2007: MIPS-like, compatible with { MIPSII, MIPSIII } but misses unaligned load-store instructions2007-2020: LoongISA, MIPS64 compatibile, the ISA comes withextracustom instructions, very useful to speed up Qemu/{x86, arm}2021-2024: LoongArch -> wtf?!? breakup with MIPS, in-house LoongArch architecture, no more compatible(1) and it needs a dedicated toolchainThen, after 2007 Loongson was fullyMIPS64-basedinstead ofMIPS-like, but then, I don't know why, the technical documentation (the small one in English) started mentioning "LoongISA" and "LoongArch" as if they were different ISA, and this is also what we saw in the various gcc patches, and for a few years it was synonymous with "enriched MIPS32 superset", then with the 2021 "Loongson3-5000 series" it really became something else, completely incompatible.In Gentoo, ARCH=loong, instead of mips64, and the target tuple is "loongarch64-unknown-linux-gnu", instead of "mips64-unknown-linux-gnu".LoongArch (>=2021 (3)) is not binary compatible with either MIPS or RISC-V, although the ISA and ABI show heavy influence of the two.There are six ABIs defined for LoongArch, much like those of RISC-V. But for Gentoo, the profile focuses on LP64D only first, multilib support will come later.(1) - "Loongson Architecture LoongArch has nothing to do with MIPS and other architectures designed outside of China" - say Chinese dev-guysLoongArch is divided into two versions { LA32-bit, LA64-bit }.LA64 applications are application-level backward binary compatibility with LA32 applications, and that *is supposed to* mean LA32 applications can run directly on the machine compatible with LA64, but the behavior of system softwares { firmware, kernel, userland } on the machine compatible with LA32 isnot guaranteed to be the sameas on the machine compatible with LA64.(2) all LoongArch systems are little-endian, while my dev board is big-endian, and can be set little-endian with a jumper.(3) []={ 2K0500, 2K1000LA, 3A5000, 3A5000L, 3A5000HV, 3B5000, 3C5000, 3C5000L, 3C5000L, ... }it can be hard to tell whether a particular Loongson chip is implementing "LoongArch" or "MIPS", especially for casual users

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2024, 07:13:36 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 31, 2024, 09:29:21 pmPerhaps we have found the right business!!!Making kits for covering keyboard keys with good wood

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2024, 07:35:41 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on April 01, 2024, 06:29:13 amIf you know about it, that's not much of a secret.The above quote (with a drawing) was found in an early Apple business plan for what would become the Macintosh.

author: geerlingguy
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 02, 2024, 12:32:49 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on March 28, 2024, 12:04:39 pmWell... to be fair,OWC's website listed those sticks as being compatible with the MDD, and I didn't go to EveryMac to double-check the specs. They even worked, they just wouldn't boot about 50% of the time, and the other 50% one of the four sticks (randomly) wouldn't show up in System Profiler. So could just be the fact my motherboard was one of the earlier MDD revisions, and later ones were compatible with PC3200.All's well that ends well, though, and after I looked up the actual spec on EveryMac, I ordered the right DIMMs, and they worked fine.And regarding SSD, it's mostly so I don't have to sit for the old spinner while loading stuff up. That's the least fun part of reliving a retro experience. I still have the old spinning HDDs (with a full image taken on my NAS so I can restore to another drive if the rusty drive breaks), and can plug them in to relive the clickety clack if needed.The bigger thing is I am trying to document all my findings with those Macs in a way where other people can learn how to do the upgrades right on thefirsttry (for exampleG4 MDD build log).

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 02, 2024, 10:40:36 am
content: Quote from: geerlingguy on April 02, 2024, 12:32:49 amI as a "viewer" (user?) have every right to judge a video I watch, and that video is simply clickbait that says absolutely nothing new.Too bad, it had potential, but for me, the only "good" part is when the other YouTubers intervene.Quote from: geerlingguy on April 02, 2024, 12:32:49 amThere are YouTubers who have been doing it for yearsActionRetro...and there are dedicated forums68kmla(where @ActionRetro reads and writes)...that at least present better discussions than the bullshit I usually read in the Youtube comments(1).I don't blame Youtube, simply it's not the platform to "discuss" anything.also because if the public is the one who expects "entertainment", the discussions will never be on a technical level but precisely on nerd phenomenology.Pretty like you t-shirts: uuuhh, ahhhh I recompile the kernel(1) for example, one YouTuber made a mini series of two videos to point out that the softRAID kernel built on the { ext3, ext4, xfs, ... } filesystem is totally unreliable, so "You MUST use ZFS, because ummm you must! don't be a caveman!!!", this was his message!That's bullshit for me, and since people like me have been using SoftRAID on xfs for over 20 years (since kernel 2.6.) without any catastrophic problems, I spent a lot of time writing him two loooooong comments to point out that his reasoning didn't take into account the observation of the S.M.A.R.T. logs, plus other tricks like making a "safe" version of "/bin/cp" that checks the content checksums (md5? sha?) in userspace of both source and target, so adding in userspace a feature to a filesystem that doesn't provide content checksums in kernel space.This, plus making backups, and periodically observing S.M.A.R.T. to be sure the HDD is not going to die.It works. It has alwasys worked, even on HDDs that actually died. Never lost a single byte!No dice! There is no way. Here on the forum it was enough to open a topic and everyone noticed. On Youtube my comment was ignored by the author himself, and the average of the comments was ALL about the phenomenology of how "nice" it is to get a NAS, with ZFS on it.Worse still to this, another level of bigotry on Youtube is added by proposing to the point of exasperation "RPI" as NAS.

author: geerlingguy
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 02, 2024, 05:28:05 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on April 02, 2024, 10:40:36 amThe definition of bigotry is a bit lost in this discussion.I love building incredibly dumb things with Raspberry Pi (and a ton of other tech), and learning along the way, and there's obviously an audience for that. Just like I enjoy watching videos of someone rebuild an old sailing yacht Ship-of-Theseus-style; I don't argue whether his old wooden boat is still the same boat after 98% of the material is replaced, I enjoy seeing his passion for the craft, and learning a ton about sailing, boat construction, and woodworking.If 100 people do something better than I do (probably 99.9% of the people on this forum included), it doesn't mean there's no value in me doing it. It'd be a terribly depressing life if I said "ah, someone else has designed a PCB, I shall not ever try."Instead, my plan is to design a PCB, which will go horribly wrong for many many attempts, and maybe someday I'll make a good one. Maybe not. But I will learn a lot, and hopefully it could inspire a few people to get into the field of EE. I think that's a good thing, so I carry on, regardless if EEVBlog users love or hate my methodsQuote from: DiTBho on April 02, 2024, 11:36:08 amNever said it was unusable, only that it was "the least fun part of reliving a retro experience".And while you may love spinning rust, I know a great number of folks who upgraded to SSDs the second they came on the market, while the G4 MDD was still their primary and newest workstation, so it's not like putting an SSD inside one is destroying the very soul of what makes it tick.If I wanted to do that, I'd replace the motherboard with a Raspberry Pi

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2024, 04:15:09 am
content: Quote from: geerlingguy on April 02, 2024, 05:28:05 pmI for one am glad that you're making a lot of videos about different things. And Christopher too (really good videos). Maybe even Gary Explains. Or maybe not.Hope you don't mind my affectionate name for you too much.

author: geerlingguy
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 03, 2024, 05:14:48 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on April 03, 2024, 04:15:09 amHa! I've been called many things, it reminds me most of Yuengling, and that brings back good memories.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 03, 2024, 03:07:42 pm
content: Quote from: geerlingguy on April 02, 2024, 05:28:05 pmand that's precisely why I don't like your chanel too much.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2024, 09:50:07 am
content: Yesterday I tried aGdium Liberty 1000, 10-Inch, Netbook by EMTECLoongson2F@900MHz, ~MIPS64/LE by STMicroelectronics, 512MB DDR2 RAMummm, both the aesthetics and ergonomics need to be completely overhauled, and the keyboard was/is so terrible that it needs to be redesigned from scratch or replaced with something from the old school IBM Thinkpad.Also, yesterday I installed a brand new battery, but after four hours working in a couple of GNU/Linux text consoles (compiling stuff), I found that the battery was at about 7%.I wonder: modern upgrades of this old chinese-mips-based laptops from 10+ years ago?

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2024, 12:01:00 pm
content: (Tadpole SPARCbook 3000ST)in the 90s, I guess it had a price tag of ~$20000 USDbut look at details:slim magnesium alloy body, military-grade, entirely metal except for the ergonomic handrestergonomic handrest!!!IBM Thinkpad keyboard (IBM was an early investor in Tadpole)an LCD readout of system statusthis is how non-x86 laptops should be designed!(edit:ummm, Tedpole was Cuipertino based, and went out of business in 2013I can infer that making laptops the way I would like them to be made ...... I'm afraid it's uneconomical for making good business of them)

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 08, 2024, 12:01:10 pm
content: In 2014,Novenalooked promising, seehere.Basically i.MX6Q ARM processor from Freescale, coupled to a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA.The result was very different.Again, ugly, uncomfortable frame, too high costs, etcAny news?edit:It appears that interest is close to zero

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2024, 01:18:53 pm
content: back toTeres1...... in the very few free moments I have, when I'm not working on racing bikes, or training, so basically when it rains, I go ahead and fix a lot of things. And it really is a dud from the firmware up, at least by my standards.I think it will take a couple more weeks to start saying "so I can actually carry it around, without the embarrassment of finding it totally useless".- - -The developers seem... only four... five guys in the world, and the interest (at least what you perceive from the both WEB and IRC) is close to zero, so I exchanged a few words with one of the developers who sometimes appears randomly, and he described the laptop as "not really meant to be a consumer product", and this confirms that is rather a platform to build upon or challenge project for engineers to fabricate the device from scratch.All known, nothing new, this definition was fully expected, just then - unexpected - he also pointed outthat "it'swithout OLIMEX's helpfor which it's very known in the OSHW community just that people don't have the required skills to use it".I didn't expect this, that is, I thought that Olimex had a little more interest - I mean man-hours that can be allocated to their DIY-project = and that there were at least a couple of competent engineers behind it, but instead there are fewer people than I had estimated.D'oh- - -So even for the next two iterations { Teres-v1.5(2024-2nd-semester?), Teres-2.0(2025?-2026?) }, I'm afraid we don't expect the popularity to change since it's basically an object (and not a product, umm formally it is and will continue to be a "do-it-yourself kit") aimed mainly at "technicians" who already own the Teres-v1.0 and who intend to carry out the modifications.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2024, 06:29:41 pm
content: RISCV laptop

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 11, 2024, 10:13:04 pm
content: Ohh, I haven't watched that yet.In case it's not mentioned (I'm sure Chris would, he's pretty thorough), the same CPU is also used on the Banana Pi BPI-M3, which he already reviewed, the Milk-V Jupiter MiniITX motherboard which Yearling reviewed, the SpacemiT MuseBook (and Muse Pi and Muse Box...), and the Sipeed Lichee Pi 3A which I've ordered but not yet received.In terms of laptops, there is also the RISC-V main board for the Framework 13,, which uses the same JH7110 SoC as the old DC-Roma model, the VisionFive 2, Milk-V Mars, Pine64 Star64.I've been using a BPI-F3 remotely via ssh, doing things such as Linux kernel builds and gcc builds. I'm finding it not actually any faster than the VisionFive 2, despite having eight cores not four. I think it doesn't have enough cache .. it's only IIRC 512 MB L2 cache per 4 core cluster, while the JH7110 has 2 MB for its 4 cores. Or maybe Banana Pi made a slow motherboard (e.g. RAM) and others such as Milk-V or DC-Roma might be able to do better.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2025, 01:35:41 pm
content: DC-ROMA, price drop? Seehere. Only ~270 Euro + S/H.Interesting. I remembered a much higher price and problems getting itedit:url fixed.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2025, 01:54:40 pm
content: A young dude, Byran Ee, made his Own ARM laptopBlog, seehereGitHub, seehereByran Ee, intervied by LTT

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2025, 04:25:12 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 29, 2025, 01:35:41 pmI see US$299 for that original JH7110 machine. It's been that since at least June 19 2024, as I noted at that date:https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1djb16c/comment/l99y8j1/And yes it was $1499 for the first 100 when preorders opened in late 2022https://web.archive.org/web/20221128035027/https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/DC-ROMA-RISC-V-Development-Laptop_1600610157163.html

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2025, 05:33:42 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 29, 2025, 04:25:12 pmYup, it's been a while since I read anything about it, busy with other thingsI'm still working on the Olimex's Teres1.I have zero budget right now, but at the end of 2025, I might buy a Roma and work on itI have litteraly zero Gentoo building machines for RISC-V.So if I take it in November/Dicember 2025 (Christmas present?), I expect to be up and running by February 2026.edit: fix a missing quote

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2025, 05:41:21 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 29, 2025, 05:33:42 pmIf you don't actually need a laptop then you can get the same computing power in an SBC for about $50 e.g. Orange Pi RV for the DC-Roma or Orange Pi Rv2 for the DC-Roma II. Or if you want to spend $299 then you can get a lot more power.Also there's a good chance there'll be much more powerful machines by the end of the year, though politics may interfere too.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 10:57:05 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 29, 2025, 05:41:21 pmmy 2009 intel mac-mini died, and my Mac-Book Air M2 laptop was stolen.I bought a new intel mac-mini, still 2009-model, but with 8GB of ram.I moved the kernel from x86-32bit-profile to x86-64bit-profile.Still 32-bit userland, but 64-bit kernel, so I can address all the ram.And as my only laptop I have a lenovo i7-16GB-ram thing, bought second handUnfortunately I can't delete Windows 10, because I need it for work.In short, the only laptop on which I can develop "weird" things is the Teres1.Which has a nice motherboard, a nice LCD, but ...... as for the keyboard, touchpad and plastics it is very "toy-like".They used the shell of a Chinese laptop designed for secondary school children.I have two projects where I design graphical interfaces.A laptop, where I can modify the firmware, the kernel, and the userland, is the ideal option.On the ground I developed+ a very nice bootloader+ very useful userspace applications+ a fast alternative to "openRC".All C/89 and myC(1) code that I can reuse.(1) doesn't compile for ARM7, and doesn't support RISC-VOnly MIPS32-32 and ARM4 (StrongArm) at the moment, but ... I might add a machine layer

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 10:58:02 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 29, 2025, 01:54:40 pmAny comment for the Byran Ee's laptop?

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 12:34:50 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 29, 2025, 01:54:40 pmThe idea is extremely interesting. I took a look, but the blog is too shiny and about him/what he did, rather than what the result is, for me personally. I guess I'm getting old, no longer with the times 😥.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 12:37:26 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 30, 2025, 10:57:05 amSo from this review ...https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/02/02/olimex-teres-i-a64-diy-open-source-hardware-laptop-kit-design-complete-to-sell-for-225-euros/... I get that the Teres1 has an Allwinner A64 quad core ARM Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.2 GHz with 1 GB RAM.So basically very similar to a Raspberry Pi 3. And a 1366×768 pixel display, and some eMMC that I found a complaint from people that it only does 20 MB/s.Except possibly for the level of support for the ImagTech GPU, I can confidently say that the DC-Roma would be a step up, though not a huge one. The SiFive U74 cores are more like an Arm A55 than an A53, and are running at 1.5 GHz not 1.2, so you're probably looking at about 1.7x faster. Plus with 8 GB RAM many things work well that would be impossible or at least take 1000x longer with 1 GB RAM, and in general use everything will be in the disk cache in RAM.The 1080x1920 screen is quite a bit better and with a recent software build should play 1080p video no problem. The SD card will do around 60 MB/s, and the 1 TB SSD better than 300 MB/s.Overall performance is I'd say similar to an original 2008 MacBook Air, which I had (and loved). That was a 1.6 GHz Core2 Duo which dropped to 1.2 GHz after about 3 seconds then 800 MHz after 30 seconds. It's definitely I think slower than a 2009 Mac Mini. Actually, I have one ... I should pull it out of a box somewhere and try it against my RISC-V boards.The U74 cores aren't as good as Core2 at the same speed, but it has more of them AND it's not going to throttle down in any reasonable scenario.The one big lack is there is no SIMD. Nothing comparable to SSE or NEON.The DC-Roma II has 256 bit vector processing.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 02:35:28 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 30, 2025, 12:34:50 pmyup, same option about his blog, but I don't have other material, except his github files and the interview done by LTT.In short you can consider that video on youtube as a sort of "visual summary", where you listen to what they say and evaluate for yourself what you see.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 02:44:45 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 30, 2025, 12:37:26 pmThe problem is not the performance

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 03:01:06 pm
content: I mean, I'm one of the few who still develops and uses Xscale PXA270 PDA (Zaurus-SL)and I don't complain about 5Mbyte/sec of storage on the microdrive, 1Mbyte/sec USB (OHCI), nor about the CPU that runs at 400Mhz.I don't like the plastic feel of the teres1, the keyboard, and the touchpad are terrible, in addition to some rather stupid hw defects,such asafter 1000 insertions, the power connector breaks and needs to be replacedthe ucSD card enters upside down and there is no extraction pin, you have to use a toothpick, which can damage itthere is no network port, for the reason that the SoC comes from a tablet, which only has wifi, and the ethernet, although present in the soc, has not been implemented because they "copied" the tablet design from scratch, therefore setting the multifunction bits for other things. This when it was very feasible to also implement the lan!there is only one USB portand similar defects that make using the laptop outside the lab unpleasant or in any case annoying.There are also problems with firmware, kernel, and userspace, but these are things that I can fix, and that I am fixing by myself.It takes a long time, and unfortunately I can only work on weekends, and not always, because I also have to fix the Zaurus-SL, and here too I am practically alone, as you ca seehere.I really hope that the Roma-laptop is better built than the Teres1, that it has at least a better keyboard, touchpad, and plastics, and better connectors, because that's what I expect it to have!Performance-wise it's not a big deal, all the software I've developed runs fine on the Zaurus-SL, and if it flies on the Teres1 ... on the Roma... I think it's even too fast

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 12:19:52 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 30, 2025, 03:01:06 pmI have not personally seen or touched a Roma, or the suspiciously similar MuseBook (which is the same CPU as the Roma II), but those who bought them say they're the same quality as you'd expect from a similar priced made in China laptop from HP, Asus etc.If you want better build quality then there is the Frame13 with the custom RISC-V mainboard from DC-Roma. But that is quite a lot more money.QuoteThat's good. I don't want to see people buying a RISC-V laptop at the moment expecting 2010's x86 performance and being disappointed. The current offerings are like Pentium III or PPC G4, but more cores (and 64 bit). Or, yes, the lowest end Core2, like the original MacBook Air.I personally find the level of performance of the JH7110 SBCs (e.g. VisionFive 2, Pine64 Star64 and PineTabV, Milk-V Mars, Orange Pi RV) to be fine and when I was contracting to Samsung a year ago helping on the DotNET port to RISC-V the VisionFive 2 was the reference target. The only problem I have with it myself is that it's limited to 8 GB RAM which make e.g. building current GCC challenging unless you restrict the build to '-j1' which is a shame on a quad core board. Older GCC (e.g. 9) is fine. Current GCC is *just* ok to build on a 16 GB RAM machine with '-j4' or even '-j8' if you have swap enabled -- it uses a few hundred MB, but not enough to slow it down.My first laptop was a 16 MHz 68000 (PowerBook 100), followed by a 33 MHz 68030 (Duo 230). I did a TON of programming on those things in the mid 90s, took them all over the world. The 266 MHz "Mainstreet/PDQ" G3 I got in 1998 felt like a HUGE step up from those.These 1.5 GHz quad core machines are much better than any of those.My 24 core 5.4 GHz Core i9 laptop just feels like magic, and is very spoiling.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 04:19:52 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 31, 2025, 12:19:52 amI never looked into it more than what I read on Reddit a while back.They said it was supposed to be a competitor, but it looks so damn similar.I think this topic is followed by few people.I expected someone to come here and post something like, umm

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 04:55:22 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 31, 2025, 12:19:52 amDon't talk to me about it, they seem to have gone crazy with gcc!It takes forever to compile unless you have modern machines.You can't have more than 8GB of ram on machines like the HP-PARISC C36xx C37xx, which only have 1 core!The C8000 can have to physical CPUs, so 2 cores, and uses non-proprietary ram, but at most it supports 16GB!Machines like PowerMac G4s, even 2xPPC7450@1.6Ghz (the fastest), are doomed as they don't physically address more than 2GB.it's becoming a serious problem compile gcc, I have serious problems with Catalyst, so much so that I often fall behind, at Gcc v7 and don't go any further!And not only that, even "running modern gcc" is problematic. If you remember I had opened a topic precisely on the fact that gcc v7 crashes on routers like the rb532a that addresses 64MB of ram.Just crazy

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 05:37:06 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 31, 2025, 04:55:22 amOf course you're going to have a problem with any 32 bit machine. All the Linux distros were dropping them already five or six years ago, largely because of the difficulty of building more and more packages on them -- as well as few people using them now.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 07:54:44 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 31, 2025, 12:19:52 amFrom the cheaper side of laptop world, the Ryzen 7 7730U (8 cores, 16 threads) I recently bought with 16G RAM and 512G (Samsung PM9C1, MZVL8512HELU-00BH1) feels that way to me too. All my normal activities are absolutely instant, even booting is so fast I only need to type in my Grub/LUKS password, reach for my cuppa, take a sip, put the cup back, and it's ready for my username and password. (All my complaints about HP Laptop 15-fc0xxx arephysical; like the keyboard could be nicer, the chassis more rigid, cooling fan quieter, display backlight a bit more uniform; all explained by the affordable price.)I have noticed that the storage bandwith is absolutely critical to me. In 2008 – 2015 or so, I mainly used my desktop machine with mixed RAID0/1 setup with spinny rust, and an Acer Aspire One minilaptop/netbook for a carry-along. (I still have it in working condition in storage.) The storage was a slow 2.5" HDD, but moving my browser profile to a limited-size RAMdisk made all the difference. (I automated all that, and discussed the details and related bugs at gnome display manager mailing list. Instead of fixing GDM, it was easier to interpose/usr/bin/firefox, so that first invocation (when no processes with the binary name are running as the current user), the profile is unpacked from storage to the ramdisk; and when the last instance has exited, the profile is packed back to storage. It's absolutely transparent to the user, but made Firefoxreallyresponsive, even with such a feeble processor.)Similarly, the physical chassis is extremely important to me. I'd be willing to trade quite some weight for a full-aluminium underside, especially if also used as a heatsink; that requires that the processor and other getting-hot-bits are on the underside of the board, so they can be in direct contact with the chassis/heatsink. There are a few SBCs like this already, and they are much easier to passively/quietly cool than the stupid "standard" option of a fan embedded in the heatsink, but their peripherals tend to not be that well suited for a laptop.Multiple keyboard layouts is a plus, as is availability of replacements. (For whatever reason, I tend to go through keyboards... although for full-size external keyboards, taking them apart and cleaning them every six months or so, made them survive for years. Laptop keyboards just don't have the tolerances, longevity, cleanability I need.)This all tracks back to non-x86 laptops. I know for a fact that there are many ARM-based SBCs I'd be happy to use in a laptop, and I suspect the aforementioned RISC-V's would be too. The M.2 M-key PCIe NVMe is somewhat critical (number of lanes – I'd much rather have one four-lane one than two two-lane ones, or a two-lane one rather than two one-lane ones). For example, for Odroid M1S and Odroid M2, HardKernel dropped it from M1's two PCIe 2.1 lanes to just one; this hugely dropped their practical value for me. It is also definitely worth it to spend a bit more on an SSD with excellent random 4K read performance; you rarely need the maximum bandwidth, but you can easily be limited by maximum IOPs.Processor speed does make a huge difference in startup latencies and howsnappyeverything feels, but all that can be compensated a lot by good systems integration, cutting off the porky bits. Gnome and KDE desktops might feel sluggish, but switch to XFCE or LMDE (or to a lesser degree, to Cinnamon or MATE), and it'll feel much better. And adjusting desktop environment and application defaults to conform to your workflow and preferences instead of the default opposite makes even more of a difference. For me, the machine becomes as much an extension of my hands as a chisel or screwdriver or wrench does: I don't need to think about the tool at all, I just do what I want. This helps me, because my cognitive power is very limited, and I can fully focus on what interests and benefits me.You know, like when typing: you too probably don't need to see your fingers or the keyboard to type, you just think of the things you want written, and your subconscious/motor memory takes over the mechanical part of typing. You only note if you make a typo, right?If I were to build my own non-x86 laptop, I'd start by collecting information on keyboard, battery, display alternatives, focusing on easily available known-good OEM parts. Then, I'd design the base chassis, assuming full-aluminium underside at least doing double work as a heatsink, then see what kind of space is left over for the motherboard. While the selections themselves aren't that important –– they'd just reflect my personal preferences –– it is all that information that would be useful for anyone else building their own. For example, are there multiple keyboard modules that can be used with the same chassis? Perhaps just replacing the upper (keyboard) plastic surface? Or with an insert of some kind? Could a single motherboard support more than one type of battery, by just having more than one connector (obviously only one in use at the time), or perhaps via a "jumper" adapter?Because the design of the motherboard iswayoutside my current skill range, I haven't even doodled any designs yet myself.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 08:40:58 am
content: do you know how much it takes from "load kernel and exec" to /sbin/init, and then to /bin/login via agetty?On Zaurus-SL/C1K, Standard Gentoo/OpenRC ... 17 bloody minutesOn rb532a, Standard Gentoo/OpenRC .... 15 bloody minutesOn Apple Pismo, standard Gentoo/OpenRC .... 7 bloody minutesOn Apple MacMini/x86-2009, standard Gentoo/OpenRC ... 55 secondsIt's so bloody slow because there are many interactions with Python and bash-scriptsDo you know how much it takes with my superfast booting process - all in one - all written in C/89 ?On Zaurus/PXA270@400Mhz... 39 secondsOn rb532/mips32@400Mhz .... 34 secondsOn Apple Pismo/G3@400Mhz .... 10 secondsOn Apple MacMini/x86-2009 ... 2 secondsSo, it's also a matter of *what* you run

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 10:48:27 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 31, 2025, 07:54:44 amNot THAT much cheaper ... you paid 700€ for 16GB/512GB, I paid (Feb 2024) ~1400€ for Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (2023) 32GB/iTB and WQXGA (2560 x 1600) screen, i9-13900HX (24 cores, 32 threads), RTX 4060.QuoteIt's really not to me on my SBCs. Even on the ones that have eMMC or M.2 PCIe SSD capability I usually just run from SD card. It's much more convenient if you want to try out different OS images. And as long as they have "enough" RAM, it's only a boot time / first run problem -- once everything is cached by Linux it's the same speed no matter what storage you have, at least for software development.You need to get gcc and the project and library headers into the RAM cache, but after that even a 30 MB/s SD card can easily keep 24 cores running gcc fed with C source code, let alone 4 or 8 Arm or RISC-V cores.Different story if I was doing video editing or even maybe image editing, but I'm not.Even scp'ing big things between machines only needs about 20 MB/s if both machines are on the 5GHz WiFi -- I just tried something between my M1 Mac and that i9 laptop to check, and both of those have very fast SSDs (multiple GB/s)

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 12:06:42 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on May 31, 2025, 10:48:27 amNot a big difference in absolute terms, but a big difference (50% / 2×) in relative terms!Quote from: brucehoult on May 31, 2025, 10:48:27 amFor testing, yes: the difference is that first run. For an everyday carry, the initial latency gets old quick. It definitely did for me, when using just the minilappy on vacations up north. (I only paid 200€ for it back then, new with warranties, so it was a nice stress-free travel carry: even if it got stolen or broken, no biggie at all.)For desktop GUI stuff, I tend to have a browser, Gimp, Inkscape, and a couple of terminals running all sorts of stuff, with typical workflows using about 8G of RAM, the rest used for caching. 16G shows clear benefits of caching; typically about half is used for caching. I do not currently have any device dedicated for compiling and such stuff, and currently run any large builds in the background (starting the build from anice'd andionice'd shell). If I were to build the kernel often, 32G of RAM would help with that.For non-GUI stuff like servers and appliances and compile farms and such, and for non-portable GUI stuff like media players, we do already have plenty of SBCs to choose from!Some Chromebooks with ARM A78/A76/A55 cores with fullHD resolution displays are sold here for around 300€ or so (Lenovo Ideapad Slim 3 Chromebook 14" 82XJ000YMX, Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3 Chromebook 11" hybrid tablet 83HH0009MX) – note that we pay 25.5% VAT here. I haven't touched or seen these in real life, so have no idea how theyfeel, nor how well actual Linux runs on these, but itisinteresting hardware. They're not OSHW, obviously.Quote from: brucehoult on May 31, 2025, 10:48:27 amThat's why I prefer wired GbE for large data transfers. 90 MBytes/sec is definitely achievable, and has been for a very long time even with cheap SBCs supporting SATA (like my Odroid-HC1, running Samsung Exynos 5422 octa-core big.LITTLE 4×Cortex-A15 2GHz + 4×Cortex-A7 1.3GHz SoC, a dedicated-SATA version of Odroid XU4).I also like to have Cat6a or better S/FTP (shielded with braid and foil) cables in different lengths nearby (hanging inside a closet door, large figure 8 loops). Not because my home environment is that noisy wrt. EMI, but because the shielded cables can handle walking or rolling over them with my chair much better. Nowadays it's the small plastic lock tab that tends to break before the cable gets damaged enough to affect transfer rates (due to retransmissions or dropped packets).

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 02:39:32 pm
content: What do you use for caching?Tmpfs? Anything else?

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2025, 12:05:50 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 31, 2025, 02:39:32 pmJust what the kernel automatically has built in.Here's my Milk-V Megrez (my current main workhorse, taking over from VisionFive 2 for the previous 2 years). Some GCC 15 build happened during that uptime.Barely any swap used, but if I don't enable swap at all then the gcc build fails with -j4 when it tries to link four big programs at the same time. LLVM has a specific build setting to limit the number of parallel link jobs, distinct from the general level of parallelism, but gcc doesn't that I know of.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2025, 12:20:50 am
content: Ditto. With desktop stuff, using tmpfs for/tmpand/var/tmphelps, but otherwise I too leave caching to the kernel.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2025, 12:10:39 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on May 29, 2025, 01:54:40 pmSo, no interest/any comment for this project?

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2025, 12:13:17 pm
content: Talking about "ARM-laptop", I found something amazing: TheAcorn-A4RiscPC laptop!I've never seen one in person, but it's amazing that there's a laptop designed to run RiscOS (v3)!

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2025, 09:00:06 pm
content: It looks like there's a "kickstarter" trying to make a laptop based on the RPI CM5. Seehere.Dunno

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 11:33:23 am
content: Any comment?

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 11:41:17 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on July 12, 2025, 11:33:23 amNot without price, battery life, knowing the quality of the screen and keyboard and trackpad.Also, pity it's the Pi chip not RK3588S.

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 02:41:31 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on July 12, 2025, 11:41:17 amYup. Anything PI in it is an automatic pass from me.This thread had made me thinking.. I have a 2012 macbook i keep repairing, last year i finally installed debian on it and literally gave it a second life. Even 5-6 years ago it was borderline useless for how it was slow at everything, but it was actually the OS. Same applications now are usable, even productive... pity the current state of UI don't like anything below full HD (and the scaling factor in KDE can only do so much.)However at some point i will have to upgrade. If only apple wasn't this hostile to the community i would have already bought an Air with Mx. But i have to install debian on it, period. OSX has been going downhill since after snow leopard and i really find things to be much more difficult than they should if you want to go outside the walled garden (compiling not using apple's compilers, using the terminal at all, every update having to undo all new UI features i didn't want)But i'd like my next laptop not to be intel-based... because i already have a PC and the laptop is a secondary device, it doesn't *need* to be powerful. I already have a PC or a Switch for games, i can do some light programming, or browsing, on the laptop. nothing special.Ideally it would be awesome if the framework had an option for ARM (or RISC-V. Yes, i know there is a RISC-V motherboard but it's not exactly consumer ready, or on par with say a RK3588 or simillar in performance. I don't know if there is a RISC V chip that can provide a smooth desktop experience right now, but it's only a matter of time)Let's see what happens in the next year or two. Hopefully there will be more diversity when i'll decide to make the upgrade

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 04:34:28 pm
content: Quote from: JPortici on July 12, 2025, 02:41:31 pmSure, the current RISC-V Frame 13 main board isn't very fast -- something like a late Pentium III or PowerPC G4, but quad core, but without an Altivec/SSE equivalent -- but it's only a shake-down product with more coming.There is already the DC-ROMA "RISC-V AI PC" main board announced with 8x SiFive P550 running at 2.0 GHz. That's announced to be shipping in Q3 2025 which is ... well, nowish. That's the same CPU cores as in the HiFive Premier or Milk-V Megrez (which I have), but twice as many and clocked a bit higher. It's still lacking SIMD, but has a TPU so idk. The P550 is a bit better than Arm A72 (other than no SIMD) and I think also similar to Core 2 at similar speeds. It's hard to find the same benchmark run on Core 2 in the late 2000s and also on e.g. Pi 4 in the early 2020s, but it seems the A72 is better in Coremark and PassMark (better core pipeline) but the Core 2 wins in SPEC due to larger caches.If you think of the new DC-Roma board as somewhere around a 1.83 GHz to 2.26 GHz Mac Mini or MacBook but with 4x as many cores ... you'll be close.Tenstorrent, which is headed by Jim Keller  and has a couple of key members of Apple's M1 team, is intending to tape-out their 8-wide M1-class TT-Ascalon CPU. The first chips may be only 2.5 GHz vs the M1's 3.2 GHz but with very similar performance per GHz. Keller has stated that they want to see as wide distribution of Ascalon as possible, explicitly including in laptops. I expect we'll see hardware available to buy sometime in 2026. helped design the last of the VAXes, Alpha, AMD Athlon and Athlon 64 (was responsible for x86_64 instruction set), Chief Architect of PA Semi doing high performance PowerPCs then I think he moved to Apple followed later by Apple acquiring PA Semi who then turned to designing Apple's first Arm-ISA cores, including the first Arm64 chip anywhere. Then Keller was back at AMD and is the father of Zen after they were floundering a bit with "Bulldozer" and "Piledriver". Then he was at Intel in 2018 and drove the 12th gen strategy with P and E cores, and also getting Intel to outsource production. It is thought his resignation in 2020 was over differences about outsourcing. In between, Keller was at Tesla designing the FSD hardware. As with Elon, he is either a god, or the world's luckiest bullshitter. It doesn't actually matter which as long as both of them keep being in the right place at the right time.

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 06:40:24 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on July 12, 2025, 04:34:28 pmThat's what i meantit isn't 2005 anymore. That board is for developers, to have something to create distros for in place of a better CPU that time will provide for.But i don't have to tell you that.The new DC-Roma board, i didn't know about that! Let's see what happens in the next few months, but i don't see RISC-V application processors that are really interesting (read: that can rival the higher end of ARM chips), right now.Hope that you will catch up soon.And that you figure out an open and unified way for boot bios and stuffI'd rather have a RISC V than an ARM chip. I really got into the "open" movement in the last couple of years, i strongly believe it's the better things for us as consumers

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 09:09:01 pm
content: Linus Torvalds Says Risc-V will make the same mistakes as arm and-x86, readhere.Dunno, I am still developing Xscale.StrongArm contains many solutions used on the Alpha project by DEC.And Xscale integrates solutions used by Intel on the i960.Things were promising back then.Then things went to hell.Let's hope it doesn't happen again.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2025, 11:43:38 pm
content: It sure will take time to reach the level of performance we have with x86-64 CPUs, but I don't think the "same mistakes" will be made.The first reason is that it's an open "platform" with a lot of implementations out there now (and it's only the beginning) - x86 has never had much competition at all outside of Intel & AMD. That can't be compared. So the RISC-V CPUs are a lot more diverse and with a real drive to innovate rather than just extract the last drop they can extract on a flawed architecture.The second reason I see is that the pressure is a lot lower, since users do not expect any kind of "compatibility" with older architectures, as was the case with the x86. So there's a lot more freedom to design things properly rather than just use band aids.A third reason is that security has been a concern right from the start and designers benefit from decades of history from other architectures. As an interesting example, the target of choice for CHERI is RISC-V (it was historically MIPS, another "challenger", but they have deprecated it and turned to RISC-V entirely).Now if major companies such as Intel or AMD entirely switched to RISC-V and binned the x86 architecture (who knows...), the story that would unfold could be very different. They would have only themselves to challenge, and it's pretty likely that they would make all the same mistakes again. So let's hope smaller challenger companies get there first and remain on the market for a while (this is the case for now), otherwise RISC-V could very well be doomed as well, at least in what is widely available for the average consumer. Just my 2 cents.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2025, 03:03:11 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on July 12, 2025, 09:09:01 pmLinus is a git and that's a completely meaningless statement.Is he talking about instruction set? Instruction set evolution? CPU core design? CPU bugs? SoC design? BIOS and bootloader? Kernel drivers? Hardware backwards compatibility and feature discovery in applications? Price vs performance? Compilers and JITs? Porting software?

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 21, 2025, 10:47:42 am
content: Debian 13.0 Ready To Introduce Formal RISC-V Support But Still Bound By Slow Hardware, readhere.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 21, 2025, 01:01:48 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on July 21, 2025, 10:47:42 amThe news of a variety of RISC-V hardware with performance ranging from a bit more than Pi 5 / Rock 5 / Orange Pi 5 up to near Apple M1 or Zen 2 is really starting to firm up now, with board vendors such as Sipeed starting to tease new products. The avalanche might start before the end of this year, but for sure will be in full flow throughout 2026.

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 21, 2025, 01:54:58 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on July 21, 2025, 01:01:48 pmAnd that would be a dream, i guess we'll see

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2025, 02:33:32 pm
content: Preliminary Argon ONE UP specs:Powered by a Raspberry Pi CM5, you can theoretically buy the module that most meets your need.All CM5 units have BCM2712 quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 processors, but there are models with as little as 2GB of LPDD4R-4267 memory or as much as 16GB of RAM. Other options include up to 64GB of EMMC storage, and optional support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0.14 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel IPS LCD displaybacklit keyboard and multitouch trackpadM.2 2280 slot for user-replaceable PCIe 2.0 x1 storage2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A1 x USB 2.02 x USB 2.0 Type-C1 x USB-C for charging only1 x HDMI (4K/60Hz)1 x microSD card reader1 x 3.5mm audio

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 19, 2025, 06:32:22 pm
content: Once again... Linus T. rejected the risc-v patches, judging them to be "garbage" ....Too rush? well ...no doubt about.He was partly right, in my opinion, because it wasn't clear which part of the code was RISC-V-only (arch-dependent) and which part was generic.That's precisely what he also doesn't like with ARM and MIPS too...

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2025, 12:49:07 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on August 19, 2025, 06:32:22 pmIt just should have been more closely reviewed by Palmer  before he put his stamp of approval on it, and especially not submitted in a huge chunk just before the end of a release window. Hold off a few days until the start of the process for the next release and it would have been business as usual and not in the news.Oh well, over on /r/riscv that story has been read 93k times in 10 days and the sub only has 27k members , which actually has increased by a net 790 (3%) in the last 30 days, possibly as a result of the "bad" publicity.There are FAR MORE people who haven't heard of RISC-V at all than who think bad things about it. who used to be my boss at SiFive and was kind enough to loan me his 2nd car when I was in the process of moving to the US (a V6 Mondeo with Jaaaaaaaag styling) most stories get read 3k-10k times. My "How relevant will RISC-V chips the speed of 5-year old Apple M1 be?" discussion posted just before I went to bed last night has been read 13k times in the first 13 hours.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2025, 02:16:08 am
content: Yeah, that was probably "rushed", especially knowing the "guidelines" for the Linux kernel. With that said, technically speaking, Linus reacted to things that were pretty close to opinions rather than anything "garbage". That term was uncalled for. The submissions did not really follow the usual code style for Linux, but they were not garbage.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2025, 07:12:02 pm
content: ... andthis...

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2025, 11:01:07 pm
content: Linus, as he often is, is ignorant outside of his narrow area.The possibility for big-endian RISC-V was designed-in almost from the beginning, being included in v2.0 of the Unprivileged Architecture in May 2014, 2 1/2 years before the first RISC-V product went on sale. The ratified ISA, published in December 2019, includes provision for S and U modes to run in different endianess (bi-endian), if desired.The MIPS I8500 core supports bi-endian operation.https://mips.com/products/hardware/i8500/https://mips.com/products/software/i8500-sdk/- 3-Wide, 9-stage, in-order pipeline with 1-, 2-, 4-way SMT ("Hyperthreading" in Intel talk)- Supports big-endian and little-endianThis, obviously, is a commercial product, not some "university student experiment".

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 10:09:06 am
content: Although the feature was never used, even the Sony MIPS R3000 used in Playstation1 supports bi-endian operation, and it's able to boot BE or LE firmware!(Ok, in this case is ... once set, you cannot change, you have to stay with it)Modern POWER CPUs also support bi-endian operation!Ah, Linus ...

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 10:15:00 am
content: Also what was the point? That conversion from/to p_uint32_t to p_uint8_t (C pointer) is "free" on LE but costs an offset of 3 on BE?Is that so really complex to manage to avoid bugs?That rants makes no sense

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 12:08:09 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on October 03, 2025, 10:15:00 amConverting fromuint32_ttouint8_tby writing to and reading from RAM instead of sensibly doing a zero-extension instruction in a register (which works the same no matter what the endianess) is far from "free".In fact it can be much more expensive than you'd expect because many µarches stall if you try to read from a memory address that is still in the write buffer, and that is all the more likely if there is an access size or alignment mismatch (as there is here).Even if there is no dedicated zero-extend instruction doing((my_uint32_t << 24) >> 24)is only two cycles  on any post 1985 CPU (68020, 80386, all known RISC), and has the added benefit that by adjusting the constant you can zero extend (or sign extend forint32_t) from any desired bit position. or at least the same as two back-to-back adds, if they take more than 1 cycle

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 02:36:45 pm
content: Yes Linus has strong opinions and tends to voice them as though the contradicting opinion was stupid and garbage. As much as I respect his work and don't mind people being upfront, that's still annoying at times.Yes, bi-endian CPUs are relatively rare but not stupid or irrelevant. Yes, it was in the RISC-V specs relatively early on. If Linus doesn't want that in the Linux kernel, then it basically means RISC-V support for Linux is dead. And with that attitude, who knows what will happen when RISC-V comes up with new extensions that Linus deems garbage.Will CHERI ever end up in Linux?https://github.com/cheri-linux

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 03:25:21 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 03, 2025, 02:36:45 pmI don't see why it should be. It can simply *not* support the Cores that are Big Endian only. Shouldn't they be the vast minority of the chips?

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 05:50:03 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on October 03, 2025, 10:15:00 amYou forget: Linus' main task is to keep the Linux kernel maintainable by mere humans, himself being just one of us.That means he has to push hard on everything he thinks might make maintenance in the long run even a tiny little bit harder, unless it is really, really worth it.The key paragraph was the one just after the one you highlighted.Note that I amnotsaying that Linus is right. Or wrong. I'm only saying that his rant makes sense fromhispoint of view, as the project lead. For the developers and end users who want big-endian byte order hardware support, not so much. But this rant is nothing final, and only means a good, valid explanation of exactly how and why this is desirable/required.(I post this because I've found that when I require such explanations from myself, I end up understanding better what I am doing, and how my mental image of it differs from the actual reality. You also see this in how I always explain the reasoning behind my suggestions instead of just showing my suggestion and letting it stand on its own; it has become part of my design approach. Granted, I'd freeze if I received such a rant, especially publicly! But, when not being in the firing line myself, I don't see it as a "No!", but more as "No, unless you explain exactly why", with the focus on that missing explanation; with that explanation in my experience being a very necessary and important part of the design documentation — which for the Linux kernel, is basically the Linux Kernel Mailing List and subsystem lists.)

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 07:32:45 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on October 03, 2025, 12:08:09 pmGood point, I was thinking from the myC machine layer perspective, that is, what my myC compiler does when it needs to handle pointer conversions.Unlike traditional C, where endianess isn't a type property but something to be managed manually (usually with macros/ inline functions), in myC endianess is a type property, managed directly by the language.So you can easily say: in this struct, this field has endianess BE, and the compiler will automatically instantiate what's needed to adapt the endianess of that specific field to the size of the operation requested and the CPU's endianess, which is itself a property of the project.In short, once you've declared endianess, you don't have to worry about the details; the compiler takes care of it!-but... my machine layer is not smart enough, as you pointed out, there's a better way to do it.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 09:13:42 pm
content: Having big-endian and little-endian data types is an interesting idea.A CPU can similarly have BE/LE load/store instructions instead of having endianness either set in stone or as a global setting.So for instance, instead of just lw, sw, you can have lw.le, lw.be, sw.le, sw.be.Whether it's really useful in practice will all depend on the kind of applications it's dealing with. BE is now a rare beast and mostly used for networking code and similar (for instance, peripherals with an I2C or SPI bus frequently use BE words as well). In both cases, the main rationale is the fact bits are transmitted MSB first - and then, if one considers the bit stream rather than how it's organized in "words", it only makes sense to use BE, because it preserves bit ordering.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 09:46:37 pm
content: yeah, I have BE onm68k, m683xx, CPU32, coldfire-v1, ... , which is BE-onlyMIPS4 (SGI/MIPS), which is BE-onlyMIPS5 (SGI/MIPS), which is BE-onlyApple PPC32, PowerMac G4, which is BE-onlyApple PPC64, PowerMac G5, which is BE-onlyIBM/AMCC PPC4xx, which is BE-only (still used in avionics)HP RISC HPPA-v1 (32bit), which is BE-only (I don't directly support it, I have no hardware, but the userland I support is 32bit)HP RISC HPPA-v2 (64bit), which is BE-only (I directly support it, 64 bit kernel, but the userland I support is 32bit)IBM POWER8 and 9, which is LE/BE, but I only support BE kernel and userland(Gentoo stage1-4 + kernel support)except IBM POWER, all the other archs do no more have any commercial support ...

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 10:10:56 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizardThe reason I added it to myC was to support mac-parts in all my bootloadersIf you recall, I talked about how Allwinner decided to set the endianess of its SoCs to LE-only and how FriendlyArm & Co. decided to support uboot.When I talked about the Neo and NeoAir board what I didn't mention, however, was that they REMOVED all endianess support for anything they deemed unnecessary, including mac-parts support!Why? Because they thought MBR and GUID Partition Table (GPT) were sufficient partitioning systems.MBR is strongly LE because it was born on x86, which is only LEGPT... I've never understood why it has to be LE, but really, if you have a LE SoC... GPT is LE and has no other supportmac-part was born on PowerMacs, which are BE... so they removed all the code!I spent 4 hours/day for 3 days restoring everything in uboot and I'm glad it works because it's the only way I like to manage partitions!Supporting mac-parts' endianess wasn't particularly complicated, as they're almost all uint32 and uint16, but then I also started writing the rb532 network driver from scratch, and here we have a problem: where the (MIPS32R") CPU is LE, many registers in the network SoC subgroup are BE... and it's a mix of uint8, uint16, and uint32...So I kept that feature of the language because it really made the difference between risking bugs by forgetting to mention a macro that fixes endianess (like with C99 in uboot), and compiling the structs specifying the endianess and size of each field, and then letting the myC compiler do all the work!Quote from: SiliconWizardThe R18K MIPS5++ SoC actually have a full bi-endian load/store implementation.Nice tricks!I haven't used it yet in myC's machine layer because I don't know if this feature is also present in other ISAs...I don't know how much it's worth.Sure I could add this feature to the ISA of my softcore toy, but the MIPS5++ is a completely dead and abandoned ISA prototype ...... so

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 11:02:25 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 03, 2025, 09:13:42 pmIt is technically what the Linux kernel-userspace API has tried to specify for ages, by defining types__le16,__be16,__le32,__be32,__le64, and__be64, which by themselves are only allowed in load, store, binary, and comparison operators (verified bysparseand itsbitwiseattribute). The intent is you "convert" the type to a native byte order first before any arithmetic and function parameter use, just like you do in POSIX C usinghtons(),ntohs(),htonl(), andntohl()for conversion between network byte order fields and host byte order as used in the internet protocol (IP) support for Berkeley sockets network interfaces).Don't forget, little-endian and big-endian are technically not the only byte orders we have used, either. PDP-11, anyone? For 32-bit values on 8-bit bytes, we have four possible byte orders. For 64-bit, eight. And those are just the symmetric ones, excluding ridiculous asymmetric orderings like 1243 or 2134.If you've ever written C networking code, I'm pretty sure you can see why having the compiler track and work out the byte order details for IP addresses and ports in the datagram headers and correspondingly, the POSIX C Internet Protocol socket API, would yield much more maintainable and human-readable code.Another extremely similar details is Named Address Spaces. GCC supports them in C, but not in C++. Clang supports them in both C and C++. x86-64 can use it (although its most useful for kernel stuff and similar that straddles different virtual address domains), but for most architectures it is just added complexity that seems unjustified. For AVRs without unified address spaces, it would have made a huge positive difference, big benefit, but the lack of it in GCC C++ explains all the odd workarounds Arduino environment ended up with, like copying even string literals to RAM instead of using them directly from Flash (like you can trivially do if using GNU C and not GNU C++).

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 11:29:08 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on October 03, 2025, 10:10:56 pmC++ circa 1989 (or 1991 if you want to template it) solved this no problems, so with a few simple definitions you could write code like...Code:struct foo {LE_uint64_t x;BE_uint64_t y;};void bar(foo &p){p.y = p.y + p.x;}... and it will just Do The Right Thing.amd64Code:bar(foo&):mov rax, QWORD PTR [rdi+8]bswap raxadd rax, QWORD PTR bswap raxmov QWORD PTR [rdi+8], raxretriscv64Code:bar(foo&):ld a5,8(a0)rev8 a5,a5ld a4,0(a0)add a5,a5,a4rev8 a5,a5sd a5,8(a0)retarm64Code:bar(foo&):ldp x2, x1, rev x1, x1add x1, x1, x2rev x1, x1str x1, [x0, 8]retpower64Code:bar(foo&):.quad .L.bar(foo&),.TOC.@tocbase,0.L.bar(foo&):li 9,4lwbrx 8,9,3lwbrx 10,0,3rldimi 10,8,32,0ld 9,8(3)add 9,9,10std 9,8(3)blrThe three LE machines have to swapyboth loading it and storing it. BE Power64 only has to swapxbut it seems there is only a 32 bit "load with byte swap" instruction so it has to do two of them and then combine the two halves with a bit field insert.https://godbolt.org/z/4oz5Mve1c

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2025, 11:58:53 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on October 03, 2025, 11:29:08 pmI never programmed in C++, only in C/89 and C/99, so I didn't know there was a similar idea ...myC is 90% C/89, but with the struct fields taken from C/99(2) ...After doing crazy things(1), which I still don't know if they are right or wrong ... usefull or useless ...... well at least now I know I've done something good!because others have already done it and proven to be correct and useful!(1) struct-type entanglement, crazy idea? (myC), seehere(2)Code:typedef struct{uint8_t id;uint32_t magic;} my_t;my_t my={/* it is NOT necessary to strictly respect the order of the fields */.magic=0xdeadcafe,.id=55};(this is only correct with C/99)Code:my_t my={/* it is necessary to strictly respect the order of the fields */55,0xdeadcafe};(this is correct with C/89 and C/99)

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2025, 02:41:59 pm
content: Well with any "object-oriented" language, you can do this and pretty much anything with operators based on a given type. There's nothing fancy about it, unless you find OO fancy, which it probably was 50 years ago.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2025, 07:03:20 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 06, 2025, 02:41:59 pmNotationally, yes, but most OO languages are going to store one of those fields as an integer and one as a pointer to a heap object, with attendant boxing and unboxing memory size and code size and speed penalties.It even took quite some time to get C++ compilers to have no abstraction overhead. If you actually wrote this with a 1989 C++ compiler you wouldn't get as good code as I showed. It took quite a bit of pushing from Alex Stepanov to get C++ compiler vendors to improve their products so that his "STL" worked as intended. Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the first IIRC and their "PowerPlant" application framework heavily used the latest C++ features.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2025, 11:01:17 am
content: And more generally, GCC and Clang have really benefited from the friendly competition, having somewhat different design decisions and seeing how they affect the implementations, demolishing the incorrect assumptions of what is feasible/possible, and what is just an artefact of the chosen internal representation and implementation approach. Even the ISO C23 standard (I suggestdraft N3220that isafterthe standard but only differs by one footnote) shows how C is benefiting from porting useful concepts from existing implementations (including C++), now that the committee is again focusing on the standard and not the needs of one specific vendor.