The Mer-Powered "Improv" Board Is Running Behind Schedule

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Mer-Powered "Improv" Board Is Running Behind Schedule

Many Phoronix readers may recall the Improv ARM development board announced back in November that would be comprised of "open hardware" and be running Mer OS and compatible with Wayland. The Improv board was worked on by Aaron Siego and other KDE developers with a focus on running either the Plasma desktop or Plasma Active, among other possibilities. While they hoped to ship the Improv in January, it's still not shipping yet to those who ordered...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYxNTg

[uid313]

I wish there were a board with;

• 2-4x USB 3.0
• Wi-Fi
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Power over Ethernet (PoE)
• eSATA
• 2x SATA or 2x eSATA for RAID
• Power via the common External Power Supply standard for USB phone/tablet chargers, not via custom power adapter.
• Passively cooled
• Dust-proof housing with no ventilation holes

[curaga]

Typo in the guy's name, twice.

[schmidtbag]

I wish there were a board with;

• 2-4x USB 3.0
• Wi-Fi
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Power over Ethernet (PoE)
• eSATA
• 2x SATA or 2x eSATA for RAID
• Power via the common External Power Supply standard for USB phone/tablet chargers, not via custom power adapter.
• Passively cooled
• Dust-proof housing with no ventilation holes

If you want this out of an ARM platform, that's asking waaay too much out of it. Your request for USB 3.0 by itself would probably make PoE a problem, let alone the fact that there is no ARM chip capable of handing that much bandwidth. x86 could probably do all of those except passive cooling, PoE, and the lack of ventilation holes.

[[Knuckles]]

Typo in the guy's name, twice.

Yeap, Seigo not Siego.

[ssokolow]

That is the true core of KDE DNA.

Releasing too late by the calendar.
Releasing too early by QA standards.


That is how KDE rolls.

...and then defending that by saying "this is the same thing we did with KDE 2.0 and KDE 3.0 so it must be alright".

[panda84]

The late delivery has mostly been caused by Chinese New Year:

http://www.officeholidays.com/countries/china/

Allwinner A1x and A20 boards beat all the other ARM based boards in terms of open source support as there's open source hardware video decoding support, something that even the much more costly and Freescale's supported i.MX6 hasn't.
On the other side, if you choose Intel's open source support and the x86 world, Intel NUC has almost double cost 130$ (+ RAM) and higher power consumption.
And you can't swap in a newer CPU card.

So the board still has it's value for some people. But I know you don't like to dream and don't mind using those horrible and forward incompatible blobs.

[WorBlux]

The late delivery has mostly been caused by Chinese New Year:

http://www.officeholidays.com/countries/china/

Allwinner A1x and A20 boards beat all the other ARM based boards in terms of open source support as there's open source hardware video decoding support, something that even the much more costly and Freescale's supported i.MX6 hasn't.
On the other side, if you choose Intel's open source support and the x86 world, Intel NUC has almost double cost 130$ (+ RAM) and higher power consumption.
And you can't swap in a newer CPU card.

So the board still has it's value for some people. But I know you don't like to dream and don't mind using those horrible and forward incompatible blobs.

Indeed, I'm keeping an eye for the tablet, will be especially enticing if you can put a 3-g modem mini pci-e card into it.

[uid313]

If you want this out of an ARM platform, that's asking waaay too much out of it. Your request for USB 3.0 by itself would probably make PoE a problem, let alone the fact that there is no ARM chip capable of handing that much bandwidth. x86 could probably do all of those except passive cooling, PoE, and the lack of ventilation holes.

Well, it doesn't have to have enough bandwidth to drive Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 2x SATA and 4x USB 3.0 devices at the same time.
But would be good if it had enough bandwidth that it could drive 2x SATA or 4x USB 3.0 devices.

The PoE doesn't have to drive all those devices, as long as it could drive the bare minimum computer with just a SSD, without any USB devices, or just a USB device without the SSD.

[schmidtbag]

Well, it doesn't have to have enough bandwidth to drive Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 2x SATA and 4x USB 3.0 devices at the same time.
But would be good if it had enough bandwidth that it could drive 2x SATA or 4x USB 3.0 devices.

The PoE doesn't have to drive all those devices, as long as it could drive the bare minimum computer with just a SSD, without any USB devices, or just a USB device without the SSD.

That still would probably be too much bandwidth. Keep in mind that while ARM is significantly more complex today than it was 5 years ago, it's still simple to the point that I don't think it even has a northbridge, let alone a southbridge. Another thing to consider is USB is very CPU dependent, even when you have a proper controller for it. As far as I'm aware, there is no PCI bus, at least not in the traditional sense that you find in x86. I'm not going to pretend I know all of the details about ARM, but after owning 4 different ARM platforms myself and doing countless hours of research on other ARM platforms, I've quickly found that you have to forget everything you know about x86. It's kind of like comparing a monkey to a fish.

Anyway, I don't really understand the purpose of you wanting PoE if you don't expect it to be powering all of your devices, especially if you want wifi. Wouldn't it make more sense to have the gigabit ethernet, no wifi, and 1 small power source that can feed all of your connected devices? This is assuming the device is connected to a router. You could probably crack open a cheap 150W power supply (if you can even find one that low), stick your ARM platform and maybe an SSD on the inside, tie the green wire to a black wire, connect everything you need to, and cut off the excess wires. You might be able to remove the fan to help save space (it shouldn't get very hot in there). That way you get a tiny fully functional system. It'll be a little ugly (especially if the power connectors aren't sleeved) but at least it's all 1 unit.

If you want this for an HTPC, I'd suggest you get USB 2.0 hard drive enclosures. Those will work just fine on even the crappiest of ARM platforms. You should also look into some of the i.MX6 boards - some are known to have 1 SATA port, gigabit ethernet, openGL and GLES support, and I think 4 total USB host ports (keep in mind I said HOST ports. You want to avoid devices where every USB port is in a hub). I'd also recommend any A15 boards such as the Arndale. Also, I'm not sure if this works but you could try using a SATA splitter. Those don't work on every controller, but it might be worth looking into. Keep in mind SATA 1.0 is fast enough for the average mechanical HDD, and most SATA compatible ARM devices use SATA 2.0.