On Tuesday 11. October 2016 19.48.43 Wookey wrote:

On 2016-10-11 19:11 +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:

...

I saw this on Planet Debian today:

"Once more this is where, once again, the story turns bleak. We find a very pretty website but no obvious link to the software (hint scroll to the bottom and find the "support" wiki link) once you find the wiki you will eventually discover that the provided software is either an Android 5.1.1 image (which failed to start on my board) or relies on some random guy from the forums who has put together his own OS images using a hacked up Allwinner Board Support Package (BSP) kernel."

http://vincentsanders.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-pine-stays-green-in-winter

• wisdom.html

Vincent Sanders (kylikki) is a fairly high-level 'some random guy'. He's part of the 'Debian digerati' in Cambridge and a _very_ long-time arm kernel developer, so he does at least have plenty of clue.

Not arguing with you there. Given his apparent involvement with NetSurf, I start to wonder whether he was in the RISC OS scene at some point - the name is familiar, certainly - but perhaps I shouldn't say such unkind things in public. ;-)

Doesn't mean he'll keep looking after this board with new images, of course. Which is perhaps what you meant by 'random... OS images'.

For the record, I'm quoting Vincent here, so the "random guy" is actually someone else. Going to the forums to find out who he means is one of those infuriating experiences involving some phpBB clone, lots of forums and "subforums", zillions of multipage threads, and presumably lots of people "hanging out" on "the boards" while useful information drains away through the cracks. However, it appears that Simon Eisenmann is the "random guy", in fact.

...

I wonder what the licence compliance situation is with the vendor's own software. And some of the other experiences, particularly involving reliability, give a depressing sense of déjà vu to anyone with any moderate amount of experience with ambitious single-board computer efforts where the vendor shipped hardware without proper software support, arguably to get "bottoms on seats" and to drum up business.

I don't really know about the pine people specifically, but having recently met with a guy from Allwinner (who is paying Luke to educate his engineers :-) Allwinner are definitely trying to improve things so that we hackers get a proper experience (either docs or code with a suitable licence), at least for some 'annointed-for-use-by-developers' chips to start with (which is still missing the point rather, but them concentrating efforts on selected products to start with probably makes practical sense, and maybe one day it'll apply to everything, as it should). One fight at a time...

With regard to the vendor, I was referring to the Pine people, and I think Luke had a rant about them in the context of ordering products from Allwinner and not using that as leverage. After all, the Pine people are on the hook for any copyright infringement at the point of delivering products as part of their campaign.

They have noticed the persistent bad press/poor reputation and have understood that what geeks think does actually matter in the long term, as does upstreaming. It's a big company of course and not everyone gets it yet, but I think we'll see progress over the next few months, and hopefully be in a rather better place this time next year.

If we can get Allwinner to DTRT then a) it's much easier for board manufacturers to DTRT and b) we care less because we can fix things ourselves and mainline stuff can be used.

DTRT is "do the right thing", I guess: nothing to do with device tree. ;-)

I guess this is something that more established companies figured out a while ago. I hope that they see that getting out of their own way actually creates opportunities.

Meanwhile, significant international partners should be doing their part, too: I noticed that Imagination had managed to prise the jz4780 SoC programming manual out of Ingenic for public dissemination around their Creator CI20 product, albeit without any documentation for Imagination's own technologies embedded in that product. Not everyone finds reverse-engineering new stuff a rewarding use of their time, especially when there's plenty of other new stuff out there.

Paul

On Wednesday 12. October 2016 11.43.55 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

On 10/11/16, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:

...

Meanwhile, significant international partners should be doing their part, too: I noticed that Imagination had managed to prise the jz4780 SoC programming manual out of Ingenic for public dissemination around their Creator CI20

right. ingenic are an extremely small team: they simply haven't got time to mess about with "support" issues for people who aren't directly paying them. the amazing thing is that ingenic fully recognise this and just dump the entire source (albeit of really quite old kernels and u-boot but at least it works) directly onto their FTP server.

Your reports about the connectivity issues probably explain quite a lot. (Thanks a lot for posting entries from your travel diary, by the way!)

Ingenic has tried to push code into various places - SourceForge, GitHub - but it isn't a sustained effort, and the connectivity problem probably makes it even more of a chore to have to deal with such services. Best to just have one's own repositories and server, I think. Amusingly, the first obvious link I've seen to Kim Dotcom's Mega service appears on Ingenic's site. I guess that if you just want to get the stuff out there, that makes as much sense as Dropbox and all the "acceptable" sharing services. ;-)

i really really like ingenic, it's just that they've gone too specialist (and are sticking with ultra-low-power single and dual core), and their attempts to do 4-way or above SMP obviously didn't work out as well as they'd hoped (we had rumours of a jz4790 quad-core SMP design a couple years back, which never panned out).

They do have this focus on "Internet of Things", following on from smartwatches, and I suppose it makes sense for what they're offering. Similarly, those ICubeCorp people now seem to be focused on network equipment, if I understand the gist of their site.

now, here's the thing: what i might do is see if i can go meet them, and point them in the direction of RISC-V, particularly the work being done by the lowRISC team. they could either learn from that (and make themselves a decent SMP design) ooorr..... they could make a really decent RISC-V SoC, using some of the interface hard macros that they've already got.

I don't have much to say on whether their architecture choices make sense. I note that the jz4780 documentation mentions "MIPS" as opposed to just "XBurst", and maybe there is mileage for them in continuing along the same path, perhaps incorporating technologies from MIPS, perhaps evolving their own XBurst extensions.

Just a communication of interest could be useful, I suppose, given that Ingenic products aren't generally available through the obvious western channels (as far as I can tell) and thus no other convenient mechanism for communicating ongoing demand seems to exist.

Paul

P.S. On the subject of openness in general, for any small operation it does make sense to limit support to people who are genuine customers. One might argue that as long as they have customers who approach them directly and business is conducted on that basis thereafter, there is no need to cultivate a general audience for their products.

But at some point the lack of public documentation undermines general confidence and interest in the products being offered by any such company. Random engineers are less and less interested in having to enter (or having their managers or superiors enter) some kind of sales relationship to get access to materials, when it all could end in important materials being withheld once the supplier has gained what it wants from the relationship. (Think about how a lot of recruiters operate if you want another example!)

It's tempting to frame such differences in working as "east versus west" cultural differences, but they are not: "enter a relationship with us to get things done" is precisely the kind of thing that still permeates western academia, not helped by the rampant "intellectual property" opportunism infecting academic institutions. It may be the case that working together will bring about more rapid progress, but when one first has to evaluate who to work with, and when the basis of that evaluation is a limited amount of public information, a lot of time is wasted before any actual work can be done.

Luke, I'm surprised you're interested in the Ingenic SoCs again. I thought you had given up on them because there aren't any current libre distros for the MIPS architecture. Has anything changed in that regard?

Regardless, I, for one, would strongly prefer an ARMv7 or ARM64 based SoC, for one reason: an ARMv7+ processor can run a huge variety of Android apps. While many on this list will want to run 100% libre software on their EOMA68 computers, I think the possibility of running proprietary Android apps, perhaps in a sandboxed VM on top of a libre OS, would increase the appeal of EOMA68 computers to a lot of people.

Matt

On 10/12/2016 7:53 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

hiya paul, sorry cut all the context: the main thing is, these fabless semiconductor companies are increasingly seeing themselves as *solutions* providers *NOT* as "makers of processor designs". that's why they go to the lengths of creating the software (which is of course usually GPL-violating, except in ingenic's case).

they're looking to be the "one-stop-shop" for ODMs. we - the software libre community - are just "interfering". a total waste of their time. etc. etc.

shenzen is where all that breaks down. everything's available. it's chaos, it's uncontrollable, there's nothing anybody can do about it - government or companies: anyone can get anything, but what they they can't get is information about SoCs: that's up to you to find, elsewhere. the shenzen suppliers, you can get datasheets from them if they think you're serious. you have to know what you're doing. this makes the EOMA68 strategy *even more* sound as i've utilised parts that are entirely commonly available and in some cases have been for ten to twenty years. i've got another update coming out shortly about this.

so. the next thing to do is: find other SoCs. i'm going to start with the S5P6818 from nexell and the M150 from Ingenic. if the distributor i've been put in touch with about the S5P6818 doesn't respond soon i'll try a different approach. it's the SoCs that are the hard part: the laptop, microdesktop and the planned 1280x800 tablet housing, they're easy and once they're made there's *no need to change them* - ever. not unless one of the components goes EOL... across *all* the suppliers that make it in this hodge-podge called Shenzen where they copy each other like mad.

l.

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On 10/11/16, Wookey wookey@wookware.org wrote:

On 2016-10-11 19:11 +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:

I don't really know about the pine people specifically, but having recently met with a guy from Allwinner (who is paying Luke to educate his engineers :-)

correction / misunderstanding: he's not.

They have noticed the persistent bad press/poor reputation and have understood that what geeks think does actually matter in the long term, as does upstreaming.

well, it's about to get a hell of a lot worse. i flew 20,000 miles round the world, was invited here to speak with their engineers, help them out, set up a FusionForge for them, make it possible for them to present the R-Series processors to open hardware and software libre people across the world, even present the idea of using RISC-V and Nyuzi 3D for a future processor...

... and i learn the day after that from being on their premises for only five hours i've been accused of being here to commit industrial espionage, to steal their proprietary source code.

now, from 20 years experience i know that i cannot work with engineers who do not welcome what i have to say or contribute. in this case i cannot even be in the building because there is the opportunity that if someone else *does* actually commit industrial espionage, they might accuse *me* - and the person who invited me into the building - of being the one that stole the code.

this from the company that's been stealing software libre source and profiting with complete disregard or respect for the people whose work they critically rely on.

i'm really upset.

i'll be leaving zhuhai either today or tomorrow.

if they apologise i'll come back.

irony is that i need somewhere to live for myself and my family, and zhuhai looks like it's the best place to be.

l.

On 10/12/16, mdn bernardlprf@openmailbox.org wrote:

This is unacceptable behavior from them.

yes... but it's perfectly understandable. i don't have to _like_ it, but it's perfectly understandable.

actually it's a reflection on *themselves*. they're saying - not to me - but to *themselves*, "if *we* were this person, *we* would steal". they're afraid of this "foreigner" who knows that they've stolen GPL source code for years, and they expect me to enact out RETRIBUTION by doing exactly what they've done, namely... to steal from them in REVENGE.

they have no inkling that the consequences for me would be far beyond anything that i could possibly gain from by such irresponsible action (including legal ramifications, in PARTICULAR that i'm in china: i would end up in jail potentially for 20 years to life if i did anything so fucking stupid as to steal from them... that's not so much the problem as it is that i wouldn't be able to complete the goals that i've set, from inside a chinese jail), not to mention that it would entirely defeat the educational objective lesson that is is *they* who need to be the ones to take action (namely, to comply with copyright law and alter their internal procedures right across the entire company to match). if someone (whoever it is) comes in and simply *takes* the source code, that COMPLETELY defeats the object of the exercise.

there's a book called "Invisible Dynamics" which describes the six systemic laws that businesses *must* respect, or pay the consequences for not doing so. one of those systemic laws is to recognise and respect the contribution of all employees (and by extension contributors). allwinner, by taking the linux and u-boot source code and not respecting the software license, is breaking that fundamental systemic law.

now, they don't *understand* that, which is why they're getting into difficulties... but they can feel that there is something wrong, without being fully aware (as individuals and as a company) of exactly what. they can see the public fuss but we're failing to get it across to them, we're being angry, rude and generally giving the impression that we're a bunch of fucking gwailo foreigner dickheads that they can *really* easily justify ignoring, not to mention exactly as you say, wookey and phil, it's a pee aitch pee bee bee where you can't find a damn thing, times a hundred, how on *earth* are the going to get any kind of useful insights out of a dog's dinner forum?

so.

anyway.

i'm done being pissed off.

useful ideas and insights appreciated. and contacts in the chinese software libre community.

l.

if anyone knows of someone in china who is familiar with free software and can come over to zhuhai can you please get in touch with them urgently and ask them to contact me. l.

On 10/12/16, mike.valk@gmail.com mike.valk@gmail.com wrote:

Good luck. And don't forget to breathe.

thx mike, yes i can get the A20 on the open market.

l.