New Libre-Focused ARM Board Aims To Compete With Raspberry Pi 3, Offers 4K

[caligula]

The A64-OLinuXino is I think the same CPU, already shipping, has Gb ethernet, and is open hardware.

Both lack FOSS GPU acceleration (unless someone picks up the Lima work). But at least they can boot without a blob (unlike raspberrypi).

You don't need GPU acceleration to display 2d framebuffer. Framebuffer out with proper kernel modesetting shouldn't a huge effort. I had the impression there's much progress with video decoding on many Mali boards, so the video can be accelerated. There's also CEC work in the kernel for media players.

[caligula]

No NFC either.

I would like to see a SBC based on the RISC-V architecture. It is a modern and open architecture. ARM like x86 is proprietary.

How does this have any kind of effect on anything. There's bloatloads of free/open compilers for ARM and x86. You can basically do whatever you want with them. The chips cost less than 3 dollars apiece. It's the GPU that slows down progress. Basically all RPi clones are better than RPi in all possible ways. They just don't have the open source GPU drivers.

[FireBurn]

Why everyone is going for the Mali 4XX GPUs? They are too slow for any use in 2017. And they only have OpenGL ES support (No accelerated desktop, no browser acceleration, etc..)

Kwin will quite happily work on OpenGL ES rather than OpenGL

[starshipeleven]

Why everyone is going for the Mali 4XX GPUs? They are too slow for any use in 2017. And they only have OpenGL ES support (No accelerated desktop, no browser acceleration, etc..)

Because they are cheap? And OpenGL ES is enough for browsers and desktops. Afaik browsers on linux have some issues about browser acceleration in general, but it is not related.

[L_A_G]

No NFC either.

I would like to see a SBC based on the RISC-V architecture. It is a modern and open architecture. ARM like x86 is proprietary.

The main problem with that is the first RISC-V implementation only came out about a month ago and is still way too expensive for the low cost single board computer market.

Besides, as long as you don't want to start making your own chips, very few companies who build end products do, ARM is practically open source. Only real differences are that with ARM you have to pay to license the ISA and you get a choice between designing all your hardware and ready made IP cores rather than having no choice but to design it all from scratch yourself. In the future there's probably going to be ready made RISC-V implementations, but like ARM ones you still have to pay for them.

[berolinux]

Yes, for all its faults and foibles (all of which were deliberate compromises for price reasons, to be fair), the RPi is by far the most open ARM SBC out there that I am aware of.

Try the DragonBoard 410c and DragonBoard 820c -- Freedreno is working great these days.

[sverris]

Does the open version of the RPi bootloader even boot Linux yet? Most people use the closed source version.

It does, with limitations.
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware (not much going on there...)

[caligula]

It does, with limitations.
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware (not much going on there...)

Riiiiiight, a truly open platform but the open bootloader isn't there yet. For some odd reason, the bootloaders of the competing evil closed source (Allwinner) devices are open. Makes sense.

[pal666]

they still seem to know what they are doing and fully explain down to technical level, so that's ok.

it is not ok to know that you are selling board without videocard and call it 4k

[pal666]

But at least they can boot without a blob (unlike raspberrypi).

they can't boot to x without blob, unlike rpi