Re: [Gnewsense-dev] MIPS Creator CI20

[Paul Boddie]

On Saturday 26. August 2017 00.09.23 Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> Op Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:52:29 +0200 schreef Paul Boddie <address@hidden>:
> > On Saturday 3. September 2016 00.02.47 Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> > > So that's a dead end, then. So if I understand you correctly, then
> > > with regards to current and near-future hardware options, there's
> > > no real reason to continue mipsel support in gNewSense
> > > post-Yeeloong.
> > 
> > So, maybe the CI20 is also endorseable in some sense according to
> > these broader criteria. It's just unfortunate that there doesn't seem
> > to be a very high level of corporate support for it any more, but you
> > can still buy it from Mouser and RS Online.
> 
> How viable is it? Is it worth spending effort to support it?

I'm doubtful. It would be useful if there were clear support from the 
manufacturer or, failing that, an obvious progression of similar products, but 
in recent times there were only the following (32-bit) mipsel-based products 
using this SoC family that I was aware of:

GCW-Zero [1] - uses JZ4770 which has a Vivante GPU that might be supportable, 
but getting hold of new ones appears to be a cat-and-mouse game. This is also 
a handheld, so perhaps not the primary focus of gNewSense.

MIPS Creator CI20 [2] - uses JZ4780 which has an unsupportable PowerVR GPU, 
although that and the Broadcom-based WLAN are perhaps optional, and at least 
you can buy one. This is for "lightweight" desktop use, and arguments can be 
had about competitiveness with things like the Raspberry Pi, but it does have 
1GB RAM, unlike a lot of earlier single-board computers.

EOMA68-JZ4775 [3] - uses JZ4775 which has no GPU, but this hasn't been 
anything more than a prototype. This is theoretically for desktop and laptop 
use. The developer of this is currently trying to get an ARM-based product 
done, and he was also looking at other ARM SoCs, so I'm starting to doubt that 
we'll ever see this in the wild.

I don't really follow other MIPS-based products, but I did notice that the 
GnuBee Personal Cloud 1 uses a MIPS-based MediaTek MT7621 CPU [4] and 
apparently needs no proprietary firmware [5]. The MT7621 is a MIPS32r2 device 
according to the OpenWrt support [6]. However, this product is a kind of 
storage unit, not a display-connected device, and it only has 512MB RAM.

It's quite the coincidence that you ask about this right now because I was 
just preparing another root filesystem for the CI20 to test Debian on it 
again. The kernel is 3.18 and some mainline targeting was being done, although 
I'm not sure how much corporate focus there is on this at the moment.

For me, a more serious issue is the weird interactions between lightdm and 
DBus that prevented an evaluation of XFCE, so I'm going to try LXDE and see if 
that works any better.

Hopefully, I'll be able to report back with some meaningful discoveries. Just 
to see if the native performance is any good will be informative.

Paul

[1] http://www.gcw-zero.com/

[2] http://www.elinux.org/MIPS_Creator_CI20

[3] http://rhombus-tech.net/ingenic/jz4775/

[4] https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1/updates/overclocked-
pre-production-units

[5] https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1/updates/100-blob-free

[6] https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/hardware/soc/soc.mediatek