Hey all,
from time to time I see the question pop up, which motherboard is recommended or what laptop is most recommended for coreboot.
What I haven't seen is a suggestion for an energy efficient HTPC. While one would expect an arm box for this, I still fail to see really well supported fully open systems. I guess the Raspberry Pi comes closest.
I see E-350 boards and F2A85 boards as being WiP/Supported but hold those the recommendations? Personally for me, it has to be an AMD board, but I can understand intel recommendations being interesting for other readers.
Oliver
Hi Oliver,
Am 22.07.2013 10:07 schrieb Oliver Schinagl:
What I haven't seen is a suggestion for an energy efficient HTPC. While one would expect an arm box for this, I still fail to see really well supported fully open systems. I guess the Raspberry Pi comes closest.
If your criterion is the openness of the device, the Raspberry Pi is one of the worst choices available. The camera (CSI) and display (DSI) interfaces are under strict control of the Raspberry Pi foundation. For the CSI camera port, you can only use the officially approved camera, no other device will work (and you can't fix this yourself because the graphics firmware is closed source). The DSI display port is completely unusable until the PRi foundation decides what to do with it. The ethernet connection is done via USB to be as slow as possible. The USB host controller is broken from a hardware perspective and not fixable in software (some stuff won't work at all, some will hang). Besides that, its CPU is really really slow and lacking features. You can't even run any Ubuntu newer than 9.10 because the CPU is so limited/ancient.
Pick a Cubieboard2 or one of the Allwinner-based Olinuxino boards. They might not be a popular choice, but you can use fully open graphics drivers (limadriver) on those boards. The A20 CPU is also pretty powerful. If you don't care about open source graphics support, a Beaglebone Black would be a really good choice as well.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
On 27-07-13 18:36, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
Hi Oliver,
Am 22.07.2013 10:07 schrieb Oliver Schinagl:
What I haven't seen is a suggestion for an energy efficient HTPC. While one would expect an arm box for this, I still fail to see really well supported fully open systems. I guess the Raspberry Pi comes closest.
If your criterion is the openness of the device, the Raspberry Pi is one of the worst choices available. The camera (CSI) and display (DSI) interfaces are under strict control of the Raspberry Pi foundation. For the CSI camera port, you can only use the officially approved camera, no other device will work (and you can't fix this yourself because the graphics firmware is closed source). The DSI display port is completely unusable until the PRi foundation decides what to do with it. The ethernet connection is done via USB to be as slow as possible. The USB host controller is broken from a hardware perspective and not fixable in software (some stuff won't work at all, some will hang). Besides that, its CPU is really really slow and lacking features. You can't even run any Ubuntu newer than 9.10 because the CPU is so limited/ancient.
Yes, the pi is the worst choice in term of openness and I despise it because of it. There however are 2 reasons why I'm using it. a) It was a company Christmas gift to 'get hacking on new idea's so I have one and don't have much else to use it for (for now!) b) I use it for the upstairs TV. I've tried several ways to connect vga -> scart (and even the TV-out port on my ancient ATI x1300 card) as svhs -> tv which simply didn't work properly. So with that plan temporarily suspended I only had my cubie's and the pie. The pie is the only one that works reliably with composite out :p
Pick a Cubieboard2 or one of the Allwinner-based Olinuxino boards. They might not be a popular choice, but you can use fully open graphics drivers (limadriver) on those boards. The A20 CPU is also pretty powerful. If you don't care about open source graphics support, a Beaglebone Black would be a really good choice as well.
I'm very where aware of the cubieboards, I have received development boards of C1 and C2 aswel as the olimex A20. This as i'm heavily involved in linux-sunxi (kernel commits, u-boot commits) :) So I know. Hardware decode is currently an issue, the libs are old and don't always work correctly and of course there's the mali. But that could have all been worked around, if only I had composite out, or svhs out.
I should get a mele with a20 one of these days, as it does have the proper connections, but the software side needs to get polished a bit. Also I think we need a proper infrared driver as the current one doesn't work as input/lirc device (don't quote me on that).
So until I have time to resolve these issues, the raspberry pi has the big advantage that raspbmc works okay-ish via composite.
As open vs closed; I suppose they stand on equal grounds (for now). Broadcom GPU vs mali + cedarx; u-boot only is useable via SD (nand requires livesuit to flash, but work on a MTD driver is very close) vs Broadcom GPU.
Oliver
Regards, Carl-Daniel
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Carl-Daniel Hailfinger -
Oliver Schinagl