Initial i.MX8 SoC Support & Development Board Possibly Ready For Linux 4.21

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Initial i.MX8 SoC Support & Development Board Possibly Ready For Linux 4.21

While the i.MX8 series was announced almost two years ago and the open-source developers working on the enablement for these new NXP SoCs hoped for initial support in Linux 4.17, the Linux 4.21 kernel that will be released in the early months of 2019 is slated to possibly have the first i.MX8 support in the form of the i.MX8MQ and also supporting its development/evaluation board...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.21-Possible-iMX8MQ

[Wilfred]

In other words if there is just now basic mainline support, the puri.sm developers of the librem 5 will not make their april deadline.

[wizard69]

I could say something nagative about The manufacture here but then it took almost a year for Ryzen Mobile to work properly under Linux. Makes you wish for a more substantial commitment from the companies involved.

[L_A_G]

Well I guess it's better to get it into 4.21 than never even if the original plan was, IIRC, to get this mainlined by 4.19.

In other words if there is just now basic mainline support, the puri.sm developers of the librem 5 will not make their april deadline.

I'm pretty sure that if they don't deviate from their plan to use an upstream kernel, which any sort of pragmatism would mandate by now, the further delays they'll be forced to incur will begin to border on the comical. They're not quite in Smach Z-territory quite yet, but it's not out of the question that it may end up becoming a similar fiasco.

[squash]

Way more excited by WD's Swerve than Yet Another ARM SoC. WD has a relatively efficient physical product that clearly has been optimized to a low price point. A little effort around building a dev board could change the Maker market and the starting point for projects like this.

[wizard69]

Way more excited by WD's Swerve than Yet Another ARM SoC. WD has a relatively efficient physical product that clearly has been optimized to a low price point. A little effort around building a dev board could change the Maker market and the starting point for projects like this.

I need to look more into Swerve but my understanding is that that is a 32 bit solution. Frankly I see it as a bit foolish to support Linux on 32 bit hardware when 64 bit solutions are now a few tens of dollars. What would be really nice though is a very small real-time operating system that is very open on 32 bit hardware. Ideally a hardware solution with the built in chops to work with Linux easily as a coprocessor / interface chip.

[DMJC]

I need to look more into Swerve but my understanding is that that is a 32 bit solution. Frankly I see it as a bit foolish to support Linux on 32 bit hardware when 64 bit solutions are now a few tens of dollars. What would be really nice though is a very small real-time operating system that is very open on 32 bit hardware. Ideally a hardware solution with the built in chops to work with Linux easily as a coprocessor / interface chip.

Until the phones start shipping with 4gb+ ram it's almost irrelevant either way. The Librem5 has 3GB of ram in it's specs which is pretty disappointing. I was hoping they would upgrade to at least 4GB. Especially since they're promoting it as a PC/Phone SuperPhone. I previously owned a Motorola Atrix and the RAM limitations were extremely frustrating. I suspect if any one thing cripples the Librem5 it will be not having enough RAM to support Desktop applications properly. I look at it like a laptop, the specs should be aiming to be like a laptop rather than a phone.

[squash]

I'm cracking up over the idea that 32 bit processor support is somehow foolish. We're shipping something like 100:1 8 bit vs 64 bit processors this year, and probably 40:1 32 vs 64 bit. STM32 is shipping 200 million units of their 32 bit ARM Cortex chips annually. 64 bit processors are a tiny minority.