new MIPS single-board-computer

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muhammed
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Joined: 04/13/2013
Chris

I am a member!

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Joined: 04/23/2011

No. Almost certainly not. I went straight to checking if the board had integrated wifi as there are no free software friendly embedded 802.11n chipsets. Unfortunately the Atheros ath6k driver is dependent on non-free firmware and ath9k chipsets aren't used in these types of boards where the wifi is embedded from what I've seen on the market thus far at least (routers seemingly being the exception).

After checking the wifi I just skipped right over this board although that said I had this discussion with another and they mentioned the GPU was also a problem. There very well may be an issue with the bluetooth as well, amongst other components, but like I said I never even get to the point where I investigated them.

What makes these devices so difficult is everything is integrated, dependent on firmware, proprietary, and the manufacturers fail to provide sufficient detail on even the general specs of the boards. Like they mention it has 802.11n wifi, but don't mention the chipset.

Jabjabs
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Joined: 07/05/2014

Yeah PowerVR and Imagination technologies behind are one of the most stubborn anti-free software companies around. The rest is just as bad as you pointed out.

Legimet
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Joined: 12/10/2013

Powervr is horrible. The kernel driver is a GPL "shim" that doesn't do anything important, and the important stuff is in a nonfree userspace library. Nobody is working on reverse-engineering it, AFAIK. Imagination technologies is not a free software friendly company.

muhammed
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Joined: 04/13/2013

I heard of the Lemote Yeeloong; that it used a MIPS processor, and that it respects freedom. And I (wrongly?) associated MIPS with software freedom.

Is it up to the manufacturers to disclose hardware documentation? Just because an architecture is free (is MIPS free?), implementation of that architecture is not necessarily free? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Legimet
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Joined: 12/10/2013

MIPS is a CPU architecture, and it's certainly not free and even has patents. The only architecture that I know of that is actually free is OpenCores. But that's just the hardware, and open hardware and free software are 2 different things.

The issue with this one is that it uses a GPU which requires a nonfree driver, and most likely has WiFi requiring nonfree firmware. So it has nothing to do with the architecture.

Also, Imagination Technologies is pretty hostile to free software, at least with their PowerVR GPU. They're worse than Nvidia.

Jabjabs
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Joined: 07/05/2014

OpenCores is a really awesome project one that keeps growing in bounds all the time. Another one is RISC-V http://riscv.org/, these guys have actually made it to early manufacturing stages and have a fairly solid roadmap to actually getting these things produced by late 2015.