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HP & ASUS Rollout Their ARM-Powered Laptops

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  • #31
    Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
    that's an issue of the u-boot you had to deal with.
    uboot can operate a display (although it will still have a terminal-like interface), and you can ship u-boot pre-configured to try booting from X, then Y and then from Z, or you can have u-boot start up a EFI module (emulating UEFI) and act as if it was an EFI.
    Yes. I'm aware. But u-boot never seems to ship vanilla, now does it? And HP, Asus, don't exactly seem like they will ship it friendly to open-source people. There always seems to me some combination of hardware and software hack required just to get basic control.

    Even open-source projects have you run u-boot around the bend, mostly out of lack of resources than malice. But HP and Asus, I don't expect such mercy.

    If you can actually point me to a project that doesn't have these hurdles, and isn't some emulated project, please do. And no, having to remove a screw and then "it's all good" doesn't count.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by mbello View Post
      We have been spoiled by the long dominance of x86 instruction set, but it is ending and we have to adapt. But even if you run an x86 machine, chances are you would be benefitted running binaries compiled specifically to your CPU's microarchutecture (Clear Linux has shown it to us in a big way). There are many compiler optimizations possible that we give away by our desire to have a single universal binary file.

      In the next couple of years we will see an explosion of options from ARM, OpenPower, Risc V, etc. It is time for our package managers to start doing this additional work for us.

      This can actually become a huge advantage of Linux vs. other OS. Windows and Mac OS will not be agile enough to support this wave of new SoC that will come to market in the coming years but Linux can.
      Haven't we been platform agnostic for a long time? Be careful what you wish for. Upper management might decide to sponsor Java all over again. But seriously, the explosion of options are just a return to the past. Risc, Mips, Cisc, Vax, Power, Sparc, Itanium. There has historically been plenty of architecture options. This is not really a new new. And both Windows and Mac can and will stay agile. Not that long ago Mac couldn't even use x86. And they know how to use ARM just fine.

      Architecture dependency has always been (post-lisp machines) sloppy programming or aggressive optimization. It's not something that will give linux an edge over mega-corporations. What gives an edge to linux is us. All of us.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by pigpen View Post
        In my opinion, the big problem with Linux on ARM is the most of the graphics drivers are closed source (or reverse engineered). The exception is the the "VC4" (Open GLES 2.1 ) on the Raspberry Pi 2 / 3. There is also work on the VC5 (OpenGL & Vulkan).
        This is not true.

        When it comes to 2D/Modesetting, the drivers are usually open source and officially maintained / mainlined by the respective companies (Exynos, Kirin, Rockchip, Mediatek, etc.).

        When it comes to 3D acceleration, there is Freedreno, which was originally reverse engineered but now also receives official contributions from Qualcomm.
        And then there is the curious case of the nvgpu driver, which NVidia wrote all by themselves because they just couldn't bring themselves to contribute to Nouveau.

        Plus why it is a "big problem" if a driver is reverse engineered?

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        • #34
          Originally posted by r_a_trip View Post
          Seeing as these are ARM platforms, will Windows be "Secure Boot" locked to them?
          The "secure boot" feature you're thinking of is specific to intel UEFI. These ARM machines do not use UEFI.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
            The "secure boot" feature you're thinking of is specific to intel UEFI. These ARM machines do not use UEFI.
            I think he's talking about how MS locked down the RT devices to only boot MS signed OS. I have the same question.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
              AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAH

              This stuff is going to flop so fucking hard when people realize that these things can't run any app that does not come from Windows store.

              It depends from the device itself. Where having a generic installation matters, (server systems for example) there is a UEFI firmware providing the same stuff it provides on x86 (ACPI tables and UEFI services) to allow you to use a generic build.
              For a limited time there is a free upgrade to Win10 Pro, so the Windows Store lock in isn't a problem.
              What's not evident is how much performance is lost with the x86 to arm translation layer.

              Microsoft and Qualcomm are showing off the first Windows 10 on ARM devices, which provide Win32 app compatibility via emulation. Most models won't be available until next spring, however.

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              • #37
                This is way more interresting
                The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by AndyChow View Post
                  And HP, Asus, don't exactly seem like they will ship it friendly to open-source people.
                  They will ship the same thing they use on Windows phone, probably, which is also what Qualcomm gave them in the SDK. Which is also a completely un-configurable piece of shit barely able to boot Windows at all, because the user isn't supposed to set up anything in there anyway.

                  But the blame here is on HP, Asus or Qualcomm, not u-boot itself.

                  It's like blaming Linux because some of its derivative is a locked-down POS.

                  If you can actually point me to a project that doesn't have these hurdles, and isn't some emulated project, please do. And no, having to remove a screw and then "it's all good" doesn't count.
                  Helios4 nas project has dip switches to tell uboot what to boot from (it is a headless system) http://hackersgrid.com/2017/05/helio...en-source.html

                  bodhi's uboot for kirkwood devices (also headless systems) is configured to search usb/mmc/sata for a "rootfs" partition automatically (fat and ext2-4, and can also read a text file you leave in a partition to give it custom boot parameters. So you can "reconfigure" the uboot by changing the contents of a text file in a boot partition. (but his uboot has to be installed in commercial products, so yeah, it requires either rooting them first or soldering a TTL header (or use the TTL header already there).

                  Really it's not hard to make a decent system with u-boot. It's just OEMs being OEMs and not giving a shit about anything that isn't main firmware (be it windows, Android or a custom Linux-based system).

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by ruthan View Post
                    Some good generic ARM Linux for dual boot would be nice, but main problem would be apps:
                    - ARM Linux has quite few apps ported, but as far i know its is far to 100% of apps in x86 builds (did someone some x86 vs ARM distros comparision - in speed (best ARM Soc vs. classic desktop x86 cpu would be nice) and percentage of apps?).. So ARM Linux everytime look a bit cheap, incomplete in comparision with x86
                    We here are using Ubuntu Linux for ARM (Raspberry Pi3) daily as desktop machines since several years, and it's basically identical to our Ubuntu for x86 machines, i.e. no apps missing, as far as I see:

                    Libreoffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Vivaldi, Gimp, Audacity, Java, Netbeans, Hatari, MAME, Dosbox, Blender with VC4 OpenGL alpha driver, etc, all run great. Well, actually Blender isn't that fast with the little VC4... :-)

                    You can check the Linux applications' ARM availability for yourself by browsing either Debian's packages or those of Debian based Ubuntu to see that most packages have also armhf and arm64 builds: https://packages.ubuntu.com/

                    Also Linux uses the ARM cores just great – 4x ARMv8 cores at 1200 MHz in the case of the Pi3 –, so overall Linux runs very well even on such a small ARM device like the Pi3 with its mere 1 GB of RAM and activated zram kernel option.

                    Can't wait to see those powerful new ARM laptops or desktop PCs in action. Last time I had nice ARM desktop machines including a Laptop was in the 1990'ies with the Acorn Archimedes machines. British based Acorn invented the ARM chip, by the way; two tech gurus named Roger Wilson and Steve Furber basically, simulating the ARM work-in-progress on their 8-Bit Acorn machines first. Well done!
                    Last edited by Hadrian; 06 December 2017, 04:53 AM.

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                    • #40
                      it should be good for office work. would it be better than chromebook?

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