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posted by janrinok on Monday August 01 2016, @05:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the over-to-you! dept.

The goal of the EOMA (Embedded Open Modular Architecture) project is to introduce the idea of being ethically responsible about both the ecological and the financial resources required to design, manufacture, acquire and maintain our personal computing devices. The EOMA68 standard is a freely-accessible, royalty-free, unencumbered hardware standard formulated and tested over the last five years around the ultra-simple philosophy of "just plug it in: it will work".

With devices built following this standard, one can upgrade the CPU-card (consisting of CPU, RAM and some local storage) of a device while keeping the same housing (e.g. laptop). One can also use the CPU-card in different devices (e.g. unplug CPU-card from laptop, plug into desktop); or use a replaced/discarded CPU-card from a laptop for NAS storage or a micro-server. There are housings currently available for a laptop (can be 3D-printed in full, or in part to replace parts that break) and a micro-desktop; and there are plans for others like routers or tablets in the future.

There are multiple articles talking about this project and analyzing the hardware, for example from ThinkPenguin, CNXSoft or EngadgetNG. There is also a recent live-streamed video introducing the project.


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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:48AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:48AM (#382931)

    If you want a headless server, buy Pi. Everything but the video is open and the Pi3 is a heck of lot faster for less money.

    If you want to run a desktop, buy AMD/ATI if you need performance and Intel if you don't. None of the ARM processors has OpenGL support that I'm aware of. None, even if you can get the closed drivers to run on your kernel. EGL != OpenGL. Vulkan should change that in the future, but only if you can stand closed drivers and limited kernel options. Unaccelerated framebuffers suck. They suck harder when driven by underpowered ARM processors which are intended to have hardware acceleration for damned near everything, leaving them to mostly just coordinate the co-processors and try to get any processing that can't be accelerated done before the thermal throttle shuts them down.

    Now to slagging this particular product. Allwinner is actually a pretty reasonable choice, all things considered, because they do low quantity and do reveal everything they have the legal right to reveal, i.e. everything except Mali. The fact noname 'gookie monster' shops churn out junk with Allwinner chips and don't release their GPL required minimum isn't Allwinner's fault. The form factor of EOMA is dumb. Repurposing PCMCIA only sounded like a good idea until put into practice. Not enough pins. Gotta go with something denser. You need Displayport (gets multiple displays on minimal pins) or a pair of HDMI controllers. The product under discussion does have a mini-hdmi but it is on the side where you would have to rat nest cables and forget using a direct digital link to a laptop internal panel from it. No storage. 8GB onboard is too much for a boot partition yet far too small for a modern distro and seriously unfit for the ones coming in the next few years. And no, MicroSD doesn't cut it. Nice to have one, don't expect to run your primary OS from one. SATA. Not really optional unless it is a toy server, buy a Pi if that is all you want. USB2.0 could be forgiven if it wasn't the only bus available and having to run both storage and network across it.

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  • (Score: 1) by lkcl on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:05PM

    by lkcl (6308) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:05PM (#383294)

    apologies but i haven't got time to go over every misunderstanding you've made, here, it's too much: perhaps someone else can help out here. all of these things have been answered in some detail on other forums. including in answers here, above. many of them are answered in the updates as well as in the FAQ on the crowdfunding page https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates [crowdsupply.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:57PM (#383361)

    Since lkcl cannot respond to this, I will do my best. If I left anything out, it's because it's outside of my knowledge zone.

    If you want a headless server, buy Pi. Everything but the video is open and the Pi3 is a heck of lot faster for less money.

    I stopped paying attention to the Raspberry Pi after the first one, but if the third one is like the first one, you need that proprietary GPU driver to even boot the thing, making it no better than literally any x86 computer in the market in that regard. (The only thing it's better at is in not having a known backdoor.)

    If you want to run a desktop, buy AMD/ATI if you need performance and Intel if you don't.

    All modern x86 processors (since 2010 for Intel, or since 2013 for AMD) mandate proprietary programs which can act as very powerful backdoors. More info here:

    https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme [libreboot.org]
    https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp [libreboot.org]

    Additionally, computers like the A20 computer card are much more energy-efficient than any x86 computer.

    None of the ARM processors has OpenGL support that I'm aware of.

    You can use Regal:

    https://github.com/p3/regal [github.com]

    There may be other compatibility layers available. I would also like to point out that the OpenPandora community has been able to adapt several OpenGL applications to work with OpenGL ES just fine; this is not hypothetical.

    Furthermore:

    • EOMA68 is just a standard, and architecture-independent. One of the other SoCs being considered right now is one with a MIPS processor, for example.
    • There isn't anything inherent about ARM that makes full OpenGL support impossible. It's just that GPUs on ARM SoCs tend to only support OpenGL ES at the hardware level. You hinted at this yourself.

    Unaccelerated framebuffers suck. They suck harder when driven by underpowered ARM processors which are intended to have hardware acceleration for damned near everything, leaving them to mostly just coordinate the co-processors and try to get any processing that can't be accelerated done before the thermal throttle shuts them down.

    I have personally used a much weaker processor without any hardware acceleration at all, on the OpenPandora. That wasn't even a problem for me. The problem for me on the Pandora, no matter how I used it, has always been its low RAM. I even had people tell me that I couldn't possibly have a decent experience running Tiled with a software implementation of OpenGL, and in reality I had no problems with it at all.

    The Libre Tea is not unaccelerated. It is only specifically 3-D that is unaccelerated. 2-D acceleration works, so it's mostly 3-D games, heavy desktops like KDE, and applications that work with 3-D objects (e.g. Blender) which are affected.

    It's not about the one processor anyway, though. If this project is successful, upgrades can be made available, at a really cheap price. That's the whole point.

    8GB onboard is too much for a boot partition yet far too small for a modern distro and seriously unfit for the ones coming in the next few years. And no, MicroSD doesn't cut it. Nice to have one, don't expect to run your primary OS from one.

    How does a microSD card not "cut it"? A microSD card today can be as much as 256 GB, depending on what you're willing to spend, and with access times which are easily fast enough. The only problem with microSD is that it's flash memory and has all the problems flash memory has (most importantly, it's destined to become useless eventually depending on how often you write to it), but NAND is flash memory, too.

    SATA. Not really optional unless it is a toy server, buy a Pi if that is all you want.

    Again, a Raspberry Pi is not an option: you need to run a proprietary program just to boot it. But specifically regarding SATA, lkcl has already explained that SATA was excluded from the standard because requiring SATA would severely limit options for SoCs to use.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:09PM (#383369)

    Current intel and AMD processors can't be trusted. The system won't boot unless proprietary signed code is run that takes control of the computer, like a kind of hypervisor that can be remote controlled.

    The rapsberry Pi needed proprietary software to boot the GPU that then starts the CPU. I'm not current with all the variants now.

    The only 3D acceleration that was usable with 100% free software was intel, only available with intel CPUs with the problems I just hinted, and Nvidia (thanks to nouveau, not Nvidia).
    Now both required proprietary signed code to run. ATI GPUs need AtomBIOS which is proprietary code running on a kind of interpreter. There's Freedreno for Adreno but most chips
    with adreno have problems of the modem controlling the whole system and running proprietary software that can be remote controlled. Then there's Freescale Vivante, reverse engineered
    with etnaviv to some extend, ...

    Listing all the case is long. But the point is that we are running out of hardware that e can control. We're even runnign out of hadrware that we at least don't know that is remote controlled
    by the manufacturer, its government, the future owners of both, the defectors or attackers of all those.

    About PCMCIA I don't know enough. The features it allows seem a good compromise. Some other connectors are good for setting up a system but do not stand plugging and unplugging often.
    Some can't be sourced economically at small quantities. Number of pins and speed of signals is maybe a problem, but not one that hasn't been well considered and accepted for good reasons. Future EOMA standards might have more pins.

    Storage is always the more the better, so you're right. I don't remember if 8GB was because of cost, power, space or something. But as long as there's a microSD card that's not a problem. I'm wrting this form a desktop that boots and operates from a microSD card. It's not that slow.

    SATA and ethernet were in an older version of EOMA68 but were sacrifized to fit USB3, I think.

    I'm asleep I may add links another day...