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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: 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...