Re: Feedback from the community -> ARM
On Fri, 2021-06-11 at 10:03, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> There are some interesting Chromebooks (existing and announced), maybe
> some SBCs as well, based on Mediatek SoCs[1].
I use chromebooks as my main workstations for about five years.
Started with samsung peach pi (arm32 exynos-5800) and one year later
bought acer R13 (arm64 mediatek mt8173), and again one year later bought
samsung one plus (arm64 rk3399).
Started to use them with debian and custom build kernels from chromeos
but later switched to mainline.
About three years ago I switched them to alpine linux (shameless plug:
I'm alpine developer but still follow debian infos) and they quite
usable though far from perfect. But again I had problems with intel
boxes also and always had to build kernels with patches and some quirks
also on them.
> Apple's M1 and future designs are also extremely interesting, e.g. a
> Macbook Air fully supported by a mainline kernel would be *very*
> interesting, despite the price[1].
My son bought one macbook pro M1 about eight months ago (he need it for
his job) and I was also tempted to buy one, but don't want to give so
much money to something which is to closed.
> > - Graphics
> > Similar problematic, vendor blobs vs. OSS
>
> Personal pain point: the PowerVR GX6250 in the Mediatek MT8173. But
> since this is a meeting with ARM, having fully mainlined support for all
> their GPUs would already be a great start (unsure what the current
> status is).
>
> Mainlined support for the various on-chip hardware decoders would also
> be great (i.e. ffmpeg and friends in addition to Linux).
>
> > Is there anything on your mind that is missing above and that you'd like to
> > be shared with ARM? Feel free to reply here or discuss in #debian-arm. (I'm
> > ukleinek there.)
>
> [1] writing this on an Acer Chromebook R13 running an ancient kernel
> from archlinuxarm.org that would benefit from mainline support.
Also I'm writing this on 'Acer Chromebook R13' but with mainline kernel
5.12.10 with three patches I added. It is really good machine though it
is four years old. Only suspend-to-ram doesn't work with kernels 5.11
and 5.12 but it worked with previous kernels, 5.8 and 5.9 iirc.
Again shameless plug: I wrote small note and script to install alpine
linux on R13, here
https://arvanta.net/alpine/install-alpine-on-acer-r13-chromebook/
> [2] I'm not aware of a similar fanless laptop
Yes, quit quiet.
--
Kind regards
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