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It kills me that it has no working GPU. :( I found the wording about XFce to be weird: They claimed to not use Ubuntu because they needed XFce, but ... http:/

It kills me that it has no working GPU. :( I found the wording about XFce to be weird: They claimed to not use Ubuntu because they needed XFce, but ... http://xubuntu.org/ http://xubuntu.org/

dikaiosune 11y ago
Xubuntu's Xfce is weird, and heavily changed from upstream, last time I tried using it. Broken themes, incompatible panel applets, etc.
JoachimS 11y ago
A GPU is actually one of the things you could use the FPGA for fairly easy. The question is if you could gain any serious performance benefits though. The CPU cores runs at 1.2 GHz, for reliable transfer you want to run the EIM interface at 66 MHz. You could potentially run the GPU at something like 100 MHz in the Spartan6. That is a 10x difference compared to the CPU. So your GPU must provide more than 10x compared to SW to be useful. Not taking parallel processing into account though.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I don't think that's a good idea. Doing it on the FPGA will suck so bad that people will immediately remember why we use custom designs for GPU's. I'm sure most people want to be able to do graphics acceleration and do specialized tasks on FPGA's at same time. Need the GPU for those use-cases. I could see a compromise where they used a CPU w/ onboard GPU or multimedia acceleration, though. Not sure if it will meet their cost or NDA-free datasheet requirements though.
xobs 11y ago
The GPU is being worked on. The Mesa driver is being worked on as we speak by a number of people including rmk and jnettlet, with austriancoder's experimental repo located at https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1 https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1. If you want to get technical, we already have fully open-source 2D acceleration, and we routinely use the 2D GPU to e.g. do colorspace conversion and 2D scaling on video. I went with Debian because we knew some Debian people. At one point I considered moving to Ubuntu, because they package "Firefox" and "Thunderbird" (instead of rebranding them) and they have Chromium as well. There were lots of teething problems, though, ranging from their Xorg modesetting driver refusing to use generic KMS on a non-PCI system, to strange oddities when no initrd was present, to the desktop straight-up crashing when logging in (turns out Unity assumes GL is present and has no fallback.) Ubuntu seems to make many assumptions about running on standard x86 hardware, and was rough around the edges. We could have polished it, but it seemed easier to stick with Debian.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. Debian makes sense in that light.
brbsix 11y ago
It currently says "We couldn’t use the popular Ubuntu and RedHat distributions because they basically require GPU hardware acceleration". Ubuntu uses Unity (graphical shell for GNOME desktop environment). Unity is very graphics intensive and has a number of other drawbacks. Xubuntu is derived from Ubuntu but uses XFCE desktop environment and has a companion suite of lightweight applications.

It kills me that it has no working GPU. :( I found the wording about XFce to be weird: They claimed to not use Ubuntu because they needed XFce, but ... http://xubuntu.org/ http://xubuntu.org/

dikaiosune 11y ago

Xubuntu's Xfce is weird, and heavily changed from upstream, last time I tried using it. Broken themes, incompatible panel applets, etc.

JoachimS 11y ago

A GPU is actually one of the things you could use the FPGA for fairly easy. The question is if you could gain any serious performance benefits though. The CPU cores runs at 1.2 GHz, for reliable transfer you want to run the EIM interface at 66 MHz. You could potentially run the GPU at something like 100 MHz in the Spartan6. That is a 10x difference compared to the CPU. So your GPU must provide more than 10x compared to SW to be useful. Not taking parallel processing into account though.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
I don't think that's a good idea. Doing it on the FPGA will suck so bad that people will immediately remember why we use custom designs for GPU's. I'm sure most people want to be able to do graphics acceleration and do specialized tasks on FPGA's at same time. Need the GPU for those use-cases. I could see a compromise where they used a CPU w/ onboard GPU or multimedia acceleration, though. Not sure if it will meet their cost or NDA-free datasheet requirements though.

xobs 11y ago

The GPU is being worked on. The Mesa driver is being worked on as we speak by a number of people including rmk and jnettlet, with austriancoder's experimental repo located at https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1 https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1. If you want to get technical, we already have fully open-source 2D acceleration, and we routinely use the 2D GPU to e.g. do colorspace conversion and 2D scaling on video. I went with Debian because we knew some Debian people. At one point I considered moving to Ubuntu, because they package "Firefox" and "Thunderbird" (instead of rebranding them) and they have Chromium as well. There were lots of teething problems, though, ranging from their Xorg modesetting driver refusing to use generic KMS on a non-PCI system, to strange oddities when no initrd was present, to the desktop straight-up crashing when logging in (turns out Unity assumes GL is present and has no fallback.) Ubuntu seems to make many assumptions about running on standard x86 hardware, and was rough around the edges. We could have polished it, but it seemed easier to stick with Debian.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Thanks for the explanation. Debian makes sense in that light.

brbsix 11y ago

It currently says "We couldn’t use the popular Ubuntu and RedHat distributions because they basically require GPU hardware acceleration". Ubuntu uses Unity (graphical shell for GNOME desktop environment). Unity is very graphics intensive and has a number of other drawbacks. Xubuntu is derived from Ubuntu but uses XFCE desktop environment and has a companion suite of lightweight applications.