Purism's Librem 5 Making Progress In GTK4 Toolkit Usage, Kernel Upbringing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism's Librem 5 Making Progress In GTK4 Toolkit Usage, Kernel Upbringing

Purism announced earlier this week that the Librem 5 smartphone has been delayed to April 2019. In trying to make that date not slip further, which they attributed this three-month delay on NXP hardware errata, they continue working quickly on the software side of this privacy-minded GNU/Linux smartphone puzzle...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-GTK4-Kernel-Work

[boxie]

Michael what is your general feeling with their new date? do you think they will hit it?

It is great to see that they are making progress, and that they are making it in the open - a lot of projects fall down in this respect after the initial excitement about being funded.

[Almindor]

I can't help but feel like the purism guys are mostly just a bunch of front-enders with a big missing chunk in the back-end/low level and hw/integration departments. All they seem to be concerned with is front-end related stuff.

[SWY1985]

Almindor
That could be because front-end is a much more visible development and it's easier to share progress in that area.

[Almindor]

Almindor
That could be because front-end is a much more visible development and it's easier to share progress in that area.

Normally I'd agree but not with a phone as target (hardware). If anything they've shown only delays anywhere in the back-end and so all we get is "here's how <insert insignificant clone of phone app here> will look like".

There are at least 2 other projects that solved all that already and are at least partially open source. Heck, I could probably slab together a phone app in one day on some emulator with Qt5.

It's all the little hw details that are important such as proper ofono integration, driver support etc. And as far as I can say they basically didn't do anything there.

[lucasbekker]

I like this project, but i do think they (in the media at least) focus too much on the phone they are building right now. The groundwork they lay could really have nice results in the future, perhaps the second or third model they produce will be an actual competitor to android phones!

[starshipeleven]

I can't help but feel like the purism guys are mostly just a bunch of front-enders with a big missing chunk in the back-end/low level and hw/integration departments. All they seem to be concerned with is front-end related stuff.

Didn't you read the article or the blog post? Because there is pretty obvious indication that they are working on that.

A significant effort has been put in to make the 4.18 kernel work with the devkit SoM. In order to help debug kernel hangs, some work was done on openocd like adding a board configuration for the particular board that will be used on the dev kits and warn when the CPU is not halted by invoking phys2virt. The openOCD folks were a great help on this effort!

Efforts continue on other pieces of the kernel too. Work continues on the power supply driver for the battery charger with upstream kernel developers and should be accepted soon. USB 2 has been tested and is working. There were also some clock issues that were resolved and both SDMA and RTC are both now working as well.

[Guest]

I can't help but feel like the purism guys are mostly just a bunch of front-enders with a big missing chunk in the back-end/low level and hw/integration departments. All they seem to be concerned with is front-end related stuff.

To be fair, Linux land could use more "front-enders". We've got enough "back-enders" who think you can "design" with code.

[cybertraveler]

I can't help but feel like the purism guys are mostly just a bunch of front-enders with a big missing chunk in the back-end/low level and hw/integration departments. All they seem to be concerned with is front-end related stuff.

From the article:

They are currently working on adapting the Linux 4.18 kernel to work on their developer kit. They have managed to get a power supply driver for the battery charger working and hope to upstream it soon. They also have USB 2.0 support tested and working.

[Vistaus]

I can't help but feel like the purism guys are mostly just a bunch of front-enders with a big missing chunk in the back-end/low level and hw/integration departments. All they seem to be concerned with is front-end related stuff.

So their laptops are also crap because they are only working on the front-end of the laptops?