Hi Amit,
Sorry, was a bit busy with other things.
On 11/09/2015 07:51 AM, Amit Kucheria wrote:
On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 8:15 PM, Ricardo Salveti ricardo.salveti@linaro.org wrote:
On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Thomas B. Rücker thomas@ruecker.fi wrote:
Here's a major challenge Linaro doesn't bother to acknowledge beyond awkward IRC comments:
- Address the non-compliance of your 96boards
- Publish a compliant open source boot loader for db410c that loads
after ROM code, as required by spec. (see previous mails)
Definitely, we did have quite a few discussions round this topic, but will let Amit add more to it (since I personally didn't have much time to cover this topic).
Awkward indeed. There is currently no *process* to check for compliance, there is only the compliance web page that I view as a charter on what 96boards would like to be.
So you don't even collect the mandated self-compliance reports from vendors? In that case I have a 96borads compliant bridge for sale and to go on the website.
I'm working on such a process checklist. That should allow us to have discussions about compliance with each board vendor and allow the community to pick the most suitable board based on their needs.
That's great to hear!
We hope you enjoy the release!
I'm certainly going to try it out, it looks promising.
On behalf of the Linaro 96Boards team,
Ricardo Salveti
Cheers,
Thomas
PS: Please resist the obvious management approach "Let's adjust the spec to match what we have". It would essentially completely discredit your efforts and send the signal that Linaro does not care about those goals, but instead completely bends to member commercial interests and those
The reality, I suspect, is a bit more boring in most cases: the vendor's engineering teams have moved on to newer SoCs, open sourcing was never planned for the legacy, low-level boot code and nobody is available to write a clean open source implementation.
Should we not allow the release of any boards that aren't 100% spec-compliant?
If you want to establish a credible project and for 96boards to have actually any meaning beyond being a Linaro member PR outlet, definitely you should not.
Or should we instead publish the compliance report for each board and let the community decide if the board fits their needs?
That may be suitable as a band aid to limit the damage that was done. You should certainly clarify in which way the published boards (CE: HiKey, Dragonboard 410c; EE: none) are violating the published specifications. As said above you shouldn't publish more non-compliant boards. This would maybe help reestablish some trust within the community (may depend on your definition of community).
I hope the second approach will find favour with the community so we can continue pushing vendors for better spec-compliance and highlight loss of potential business due to non-compliance.
I for one will unsubscribe from the mailing list and drop the IRC channel if Linaro chooses for 96boards to be such a toothless venture. There is no value if the spec doesn't need to be followed and EVERYTHING IS OPTIONAL.
On a snarky see-the-positive-in-this note: At least it would enable CE boards with proper Ethernet also on the small form factor, as height and size restrictions are then also optional.
I honestly believe that the developer community would be interested to see several board options available that boot with a modern stack[1],
Yes, as long as the SoC supports things with its locked down boot loader and total lack of documentation for gpu, peripherals, registers, etc. Everything is optional!
more of the code being merged upstream in every merge window, more consolidation happening at each release[2]
Sure, but what does this specifically have to do with board hardware? Hardware runs software, yes... But it can have any size or shape.
and an easier out-of-the-box developer experience. Then if you really wanted a fully open graphics stack, you'd pick one board but if your main interest was hacking on the boot firmware, you'd pick another one[3].
Well if such will exist, ever. Remember, everything is now optional and IPR protection and corporate interests rule without bounds.
boards are worthless for most use cases. Acknowledge you fsckd up big time, publish a post mortem, consolidate your compliance documentation to be less confusing, make sure all future boards are compliant.
I don't think changing the spec to match what we have was something that was discussed, since we want the boards to be compliant with what we already have. Having open source firmware is a big win.
Agreed. We need to convince the board vendors of the commercial benefits of complying with the specification and then let the community vote with their wallets.
Depending on your definition of community this might end up having none beyond some people looking for cheap EVMs, although I don't think I can buy any of the SoCs used on 96boards so far in Qty==1.
We'll also need some time to get the compliance process in place while putting out new releases with fresh software.
Can't resist to state the obvious: That should have been in place before the first board was ever announced.
[1] Mainline or close to mainline versions of kernel, bootloader, plumbing, Xorg, AOSP that are constantly tracked by Linaro engineers [2] Consistent bootloader interface, single kernel image, single Xorg version across GPU drivers, consistent programming model for the expansion interfaces, ... [3] And if you want to hack on the entire software stack, perhaps you might find something of interest on the Linaro careers page? ;-)
Cheers,
Thomas