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Please let me know if you have any questions.
by alexvoica 12y ago
Please let me know if you have any questions.
- dman 12y agoWhat is the story around linux drivers for the GPU?
- TD-Linux 12y agoHorrendous - PowerVR is one of the worst companies wrt open source. You do get OpenGL ES 2.0 blobs, though.
- b1gtuna 12y agoWho has the best support when it comes to gfx?
- ANTSANTS 12y agoOpen source graphics? Intel (they actually have an open source driver team), then AMD (they at least provide decent hardware documentation), then pretty much everyone else ships binary blobs and doesn't document anything.
- wolfgke 12y agoBig parts of the VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi) are documented - though not completely (especially the video acceleration unit is not yet publicly documented, officially for the reason that you have to pay license fees for some video codecs): http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ From the embedded GPUs VideoCore IV is as far as I know thus the most open (but rather the one-eyed among the blind).
- alexvoica 12y agoThe kernel part is open while the user space is in binary blob form.
- dman 12y agoBut is it available without publicly without signing an NDA / jumping through hoops? Would love to get this working on as a small debian box.
- alexvoica 12y agoEverything should be on https://github.com/mips https://github.com/mips. Please have a quick look and tell me if there is something missing that you'd like to see.
- cmrdporcupine 12y agoWhy the choice to go with a locked down GPU? Apart from openness concerns what about people who don't want to use Linux? Folks who write their own OS or use it bare-metal? This is a real downside to the RPi right now. I've been wanting to do stuff with MIPS instead of ARM, but this board won't be it.
- frikk 12y agoAny plans to make the hardware open? Or at least the gerber / board files. This could be useful for commercial applications.
- alexvoica 12y agoThere are schematics available at http://elinux.org/CI20_Hardware/Documentation http://elinux.org/CI20_Hardware/Documentation Is that enough?
- p8952 12y agoSorry if this is detailed somewhere on the site... but does it run from the mainline Linux kernel? Or do you need additional patches and/or binary blobs?
- alexvoica 12y agoWe have documented our progress on eLinux http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20 http://elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20. http://elinux.org/CI20_upstream http://elinux.org/CI20_upstream is probably the place to start.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI was hoping you would go with a MIPS64 architecture rather than the MIPS32 as 'leap' over the current bunch. Also no SATA? Network storage is ok but local SATA for an SSD would be nice.
- alexvoica 12y agoWe wanted a general purpose platform at a decent price and the SoC from Ingenic offered that - and more.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoFair enough, the Pi killer is a dual core 64 bit SoC with a GB ethernet port, a SATA port, a 1080p/60 capable GPU, and support for 2 - 8GB of DDR4 memory. That is like the 21st century set top box thingy, and possibly throw around computer. At a MSRP of < $50 (which makes it killer) (PSU, case, ssd, monitor etc all extra of course).
- alexvoica 12y agoThis is the first board in a series of many. We have some very exciting things planned for the future.
- tmuir 12y agoIt's still 32 bit, only has 1GB RAM and it's $91 at Digikey, but the Olinuxino A20, from Olimex seems to meet just about all of your other criteria. I've only used the A10, which is $42, but single core, no flash, no analog audio jacks, and for some maddening/expensive reason, 0.05" headers, instead of the 0.1" on the A20. It's a little behind the bleeding edge of Linux (still at 3.4), but I've been able to port an app from a beaglebone black to this with virtually no headaches. In fact, it's been nice, since there is no device tree at 3.4. Best of all, it's readily available, unlike the BBB.
- ensignavenger 12y agoAre there any good web pages or resources that offer a good high level overview of the differences between MIPS and ARM architectures generally?
- alexvoica 12y agoNot really - and if they are, they are usually biased. You can try this: http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academic/courses/ece2035/readings/embedded/MIPSvsARM.pdf http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academic/courses/ece2035/readings/...
- monocasa 12y agoIt's a pretty standard RISC about halfway between SH4 and ARM in RISCiness(TM). It's memory map is a little different. (For MIPS32 at least, not sure what KSEG of MIPS64 looks like) 80000000-9FFFFFFF is fixed to a cached view of the first 512MB of physical memory. A0000000-BFFFFFFF is fixed to an uncached view. Everything else is only accessible by mapping it via the MMU (both from a physical and virtual context). Last I played with MIPS cores, they were only soft fill TLBs, but maybe that's changed. Thumb2 is more expressive than MIPS16 IMO (but that's just, like, my opinion, man). Other than that, the microarchitectual differences between individual implementations greatly outweigh the influence of the ISA, but for an in order design at least you can probably make a MIPS that'll compete well with an ARM for less transistors.
- WallWextra 12y agoARM has that inline shifter and predicated instructions, both of which were removed in arm64. Those are the most salient things.
- sfreitag 12y agoIs OpenCL supported?
- alexvoica 12y agoNo, only OpenGL (ES).