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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.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 01 2016, @10:08PM
Ethical? If anything, this stupid design will make the hardware even more disposable.
Can I upgrade the RAM? No. It's soldered on.
Can I upgrade the storage? No. It's soldered on.
What exactly is the benefit here? And what happens when you need more RAM? What happens when your eMMC goes bad like what happened to my beagle board? Now you have a useless card with working RAM and CPU but broken storage. A single point of failure is all you invested in. Same goes if you RAM/CPU goes bad or the card fails to boot. How do you remove your eMMC chip and recover your files? Now you need a whole new card and the existing one is trash along with your data. No thank you. Been there, done that.
How is this better than a proper laptop? That I can move the card to another case? Big deal. I can plug a 27" monitor into my laptop as well as keyboard and mouse without unplugging its motherboard or CPU. Now I have a desktop! Plus I can remove/replace the disk, and upgrade the memory. Two birds, one stone.
There is a limit to how much you can upgrade a system. It's great that you want to save the environment and all but the method you introduced is absurd. You want a true enviro firendly computer design? Look no further than the humble ATX standard. I can swap any component I please to upgrade is small steps. An SSD here, new GPU there, and I'm done. I have put modern AMD and Intel boards and GPU's into ATX cases that are 10+ years old. My favorite is a Sun Ultra 20 (originally Opteron based) and an SGI 330. How's that for recycling?
(Score: 1) by Chrontius on Monday August 01 2016, @10:41PM
Don't forget that the µSD slot is there for mass storage.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:21AM
First, let me be clear -- I'm going to talk as though this standard has succeeded already, and there's multiple CPU cards and multiple systems to use them in; after all, the whole point of this is to bootstrap the EOMA68 ecosystem, and if it only results in a single A20 CPU card, a laptop, and a minidesktop/breakout, it hasn't succeeded at all. So i won't address issues like "But there's no point in modularity if there's only one module that fits!". Those aren't invalid criticisms, but they're inevitable at this point -- and you'll have to judge for yourself the risk it never gets past this point.
Anyway, you're coming at this from a desktop perspective, and comparing it to the most desktop-like laptops. Note that quite a few laptops do have soldered-down RAM. Storage is arguably a downside, but even there, a few of the netbook/chromebook type laptops that this actually competes with have soldered-down SSDs as well. Your perspective is absolutely not wrong, but it's not the most useful to understand what EOMA68 could achieve compared to its direct competition.
ATX is great for desktops, but it doesn't do a thing to help with laptops, tablets, and embedded devices -- and that's what the EOMA68 standard is about. It doesn't really extend down to mobile phones, though a brick-phone with EOMA68 is just conceivable, and I personally would love it. It also only covers part of the laptop region, specifically netbook/chromebook type things, though the eventual type-III PCMCIA-based version, with higher power limit, will stretch that range. The reason it's currently focused on laptop and mini-desktop is partly historical chance (a KDE-based tablet was actually planned as the first mass-produced chassis, but fell through), and partly their usefulness for development on other platforms. (Plug a CPU card into a mini-desktop for development, plug it back into your new tablet chassis for testing, repeat till it works.)
I mentioned "embedded" -- to be clear what sort of thing I mean, you know the trend of people taking appliances that would normally be connected to a PC (especially 3D printers, but other stuff too) and sticking a Raspberry Pi or similar with a small display on to make them standalone? EOMA68 is great for this sort of thing, because you get choice of processors easily (compare adapting a Raspberry Pi hat into a BBB cape), and potentially "free" upgrades with hand-me-down CPU cards. And if you're making a project with a custom PCB, it's relatively easy to add an EOMA68 slot -- the CPU card has all the difficult and/or multilayer stuff done, so you can add it to a simple double-sided PCB. Or you can make your own projects designed around the EOMA68 from scratch -- it's no harder than designing a "hat", "cape", or such for other single-board computers, but you gain futureproofing and choice.
The EOMA68 actually helps a little with hardware failures (after all, compared to a tablet with everything soldered, at least you don't also have an LCD, touchscreen, battery, etc. rendered useless by your eMMC failure), but that's just gravy; the main point (from the consumer perspective) is to beat the upgrade treadmill. When the next hot processor comes out, and everyone bloats up their code to require it, you pull the still-working card from your laptop chassis and put a new one in. Then you put the "old" card in some other system (e.g. digital picture frame, router, 3D printer), replacing its even older CPU, and it gets a "free" upgrade. Or to put it another way, the cost of the new CPU card is amortized over two, three, or even more devices that receive upgrades, whether directly or second-hand.
(Score: 1) by mafm on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:15PM
Thanks for your comment, it really highlights the strengths and key points that the project tries to address.
Yes, desktops are still quite modular, but the devices that have cropped up in the last few years do not work in that way, and as soon as some component fails or lags behind (e.g. memory of a tablet) the device is as good as dead. I have several of these gathering dust around the house.
(Score: 1) by lkcl on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:01PM
Can I upgrade the RAM? No. It's soldered on.
the RAM ICs (only 2 of them) cost $3 each. it would be financially unviable to consider socketing them (SODIMM sockets are around $1.50), and they're maxed out anyway.
Can I upgrade the storage? No. It's soldered on.
the NAND IC costs $5 and is only one of the storage options. again it would financially unviable to consider socketing them. other storage options include *TWO* micro-sd slots and *THREE* full-speed USB2 sockets. storage isn't going to be a problem.
What exactly is the benefit here?
the benefits are huge... and not specifically the ones that you're envisioning, because it sounds like you're used to high-end desktop PCs. the whitepaper "scenarios" section goes over a *SMALL* list of the benefits. http://rhombus-tech.net/whitepapers/ecocomputing_07sep2015/ [rhombus-tech.net]
And what happens when you need more RAM?
upgrade with a $30 to $60 computer card. keep the old one until you're confident that all apps and data have been transferred and are fully operational. don't tell me that you can do that with a standard laptop or desktop PC.
What happens when your eMMC goes bad like what happened to my beagle board?
i'm assuming you have backups. in the case of the A20, which is "unbrickable", it boots from external MicroSD as a first priority (not the NAND). sounds to me though like you were running ext4 and probably swap. generally a bad idea. you should look up the "read-only rootfs" scripts for debian - it's doable, and there's one for remounting read-only and one for read-write so you can do OS upgrades etc. without destroying the NAND / eMMC. the general idea is you run /var/log and pretty much everything else off of shm / tmpfs. it works really well, and speeds up your system in the process.
Now you have a useless card with working RAM and CPU but broken storage. A single point of failure is all you invested in.
not with an A20 you don't. i deliberately picked the A20 because of the "unbrickable" design.
if your $5 processor breaks or your $6 worth of RAM, my advice is: don't worry about it. put in the *spare* computer card which you bought for that exact eventuality (or dust off the previous generation one that you kept around) and carry on working.
you're imagining that there are problems where there aren't any. imagine the same scenario with a standard laptop. you ever tried disassembling a mass-produced laptop? you seen the warnings about the apple 2012 macbooks? they state VERY CLEARLY, be VERY CAREFUL so as not to puncture the battery and cause a lithium fire.
by total contrast with an EOMA68 design just push the button, pop out the faulty computer card, put in the spare... you're up and running within under a minute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:10PM
One of the main points of this design is to literally replace the whole motherboard while keeping the rest of the machine.
Less waste, way cheaper in the long run, user-friendly, etc.
Sure that means less flexibility for RAM upgrade (and other individual parts) at first,
but who knows, maybe a more expensive version with sockets could be a possibility
in the future. But it has to start somewhere.
Worst case, that's a comparatively small compromise since a more powerful card would still be relatively cheap.
That ATX thing looks like a good idea, I' don't know about it. But I'm pretty sure it can hardly be fully libre.
Probably less portable/adaptable, and costs way more. It also can't be as ethical, as eco-friendly,
can't be repaired as easily (and for less money), etc.
Seriously, if you still think it's a stupid design, you're still focusing on the finger pointing away to the moon, so to speak.
You focus so much on performance right now (in its infancy) when it can only get better with time and support.
Performance will come.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @07:52AM
ATX is just the format for motherboards inside "normal" desktop PCs. A kind of standard that defines board dimensions, connectors, etc. so that you can build a PC picking among different cases, power supplies, motherboards, etc. I don't think the CPU sockets are part of ATX or even the DIMM sockets, it's just something the motherboard designers often put in. CPU sockets change every generation of CPUs and DIMMs are only compatible to similarly fast buses, so it's not such a mix and match freely, but there's quite a lot of choice.
The format itself is allright for the desktp use case. Its diminishing sales are related to that everyone already has desktop PCs and it's hard to justify new features or performance, and other problems:
- common operating systems are poor and people resist to change to uncommon ones
- people fall addict to mobility and prefer computers they can carry with them always
- maintaining a PC is too difficult for some people that they prefer thowing out a device every year or two. That's partly because of the internet wars and malware business but also because the poor software choices and habits, not an intrinsically unavoidable problem.
- simply out of fashion ?
The realproblem is that all modern CPUs to put in those ATX motherboards are cracked from factory to allow third parties to remote control, spy and sabotage your computing if they (or whoever gets that access in the future) want to. They carry unreplaceable operating system/hypervisor and server software which controls your operating system. And the CPU won't even access RAM before this hypervisor is verified as unaltered (with a digital signature) and set up.
The problem with older ATX motherboards is that they carry proprietary software in their BIOS ROMs that can still take control of the computer. Those BIOS can be replaced with libreboot but it takes a lot of reverser engineering, so there aren't many options already available.
See https://libreboot.org/faq/#intel [libreboot.org] for details.
Once the chips themselfs come cracked, you can only try to avoid the manufacturers that do so. But:
- Manufacturers are few
- The portion of CPU manufacturers that allow you to boot an operating system under your control keep decreasing. Those that still allow you are the ones selling less powerful processors so that the overhead of cryptography and system management mode is too much compared to the rest of the design. And those have other problems for 100% free software operation
- Despite the moore law dubious keeping pace, and the use cases for more performane being more dubious, people keep massively buying more powerful but more remote conrolled devices because of network effects (they want to see videos with excessive resolution, etc.) and that it is to hard for lay people to analyse the threats. It's easier to just compare price, RAM size, number of cores and clock. This spec race means manufacturing equipment needs to be replaced often, and that makes it more difficult in capital to build processors, so helping to keep the market an oligopoly.
I really would like that the most performant and cheap computers were the more free, but it will never ever be so. Your data, your freedom and the possibility to screw you when somebody pays for it are parts of the prices you pay for this powerful computers that you buy at little money cost and high non-money cost. If that's the deal you like, you're normal, most people prefer this, and I stopped caring whether they understand it or not. If yo want another deal then look at EOMA-68, tinkerphones, talos, ministry of freedom, think penguin, the Pyra handheld and others. Or in general, if that's too complex for you but don't want to be ripped off, go and look at RYF certified hardware. Of the ones I know EOMA is the most environmentally aware. But only if successful, of course.
You'll find some ATX motherboards that are RYF. But very few. I think I remember 2 that you can buy online and use without any installation or reverse engineering. I may not be aware of all of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @06:45PM
Thanks for the info.
Ok so basically, the argument of ATX being as modular (if not more)
is at least more meaningful than the laptop argument, since when the laptop is dead,
most of it is.
Indeed some powerful ATX motherboards are fully libre. But they cost an arm.
But fully libre, comparatively very cheap, and with a bright future performance-wise, EOMA68 has this.
Privacy matters, it's not for some lunatics: https://www.privacytools.io/ [privacytools.io]
But it's more than that, it's about the ability to improve, build upon, and do whatever you want with your machine.
No industry-imposed limits.