02:23 <lkcl> arossdotme: oh yeah :)

17:17 <edwin> lkcl: some questions (based on the info on the crowdsupply page, sorry if this is answered elsewhere already)

17:17 <edwin> - eoma68 upgradable CPU card - thats great, on my desktop the various socket forms became obsolete so I had to upgrade motherboard+CPU. What upgrades are you planning to provide, will there be ARM64 options in the future, more RAM, etc.?

17:17 <edwin> - FOSS firmware for EC - good. How about the BIOS, does it need one, can you use libreboot for it?

17:17 <edwin> - how can I connect an SSD? I see there is no SATA, and probably no PCIe either

17:17 <edwin> - in the RYF certified option where you disable MALI, what chip will provide the video output?

17:17 <edwin> - the specs in this EOMA68 seem better suited for a tablet, would a tablet make sense physically (not sure how big EOMA68 card has to be), and do you plan to provide it in the future?

19:24 <arossdotme> edwin, repeating what i remember...

19:26 <arossdotme> the tablet was acterly the first product... things happened with another group... and well it went on holdish and then luke was rethinking the spec... the laptop got sponsored and the tablet is waiting for sponsorship :D. im looking forward very much to one day having one :).

19:27 <arossdotme> actuality

19:27 <arossdotme> (spell correction)

19:27 <arossdotme> for RTF the mail.ko kernel module will not be compiled so it will not show up in user space.

19:29 <arossdotme> ssd via usb to sata addaptor. eoma-68 has usb 3.1 support. so with upcomming soc’s and computer cards with those soc’s, there will be nice fast usb3.1 for your cool fast file transfers. in mean time one has to compormise and make do as weve been for some time with usb2 for the a20 card.

19:30 <arossdotme> there are 2 usb ports in the eoma-68 spec at least and on the a20 a bouns one of the edge of the card

19:32 <arossdotme> uboot (the arm equivalent of an x86 bois) is fully free so i think that means free software only boot loader thingy :)

19:33 <arossdotme> upgrades wise. the spec of the connections are fixed but the soc(cpu,gpu,vpu,etc), ram are all upgradable/swapable. what ever you want as long as it is within the power budget and fits in the package.

19:35 <arossdotme> **"whatever you want" depends if theres NDA’s and the MOQ unless someone else wants to make a devil deal with the devil heh :)

19:38 <arossdotme> i think a intel card might be possible

19:38 <arossdotme> talking of the devil heh }:) hehe

19:41 <arossdotme> edit: there are 2 usb ports in the eoma-68 spec and the a20 card has a bonus one of the edge of the card.

19:44 <arossdotme> i hope that is of help, as ever lukes ya best bet :)

19:47 <edwin> arossdotme: thanks for the info

19:47 <arossdotme> your welcome :)

19:48 <arossdotme> any more questions and ill try and answer them for ya

19:50 <arossdotme> maybe this would be fairer : "and then luke was rethinking/took the opportunity to rethink the spec..."

20:08 <arossdotme> edwin, oh yea on the list is a quad core, 4gb ram arm64bit i think allwinner card

20:09 <arossdotme> todo/upcoming card/future/when source code and gpl complied with :)

20:18 <edwin> cool :)

21:07 <edwin> I've been looking around on the wiki, and came across this: http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/fpga_card/ you might want to take a look at ice40, there is a fully open toolchain down to the reverse-engineered bitstream: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

21:08 <edwin> (TBH ice40 hx8k can fit some picorv32 or mor1kx, but its probably a lot slower than the ARM CPU)

21:16 <lkcl> so yeah anyway if MALI (which is memory-mapped) doesn't have the mali.ko kernel module compiled up, you *LITERALLY* cannot tell that MALI is even there

21:17 <edwin> is there something else in the SoC that provides at least 2D video output in that case?

21:18 <edwin> I think I'm a bit confused on what will provide video output if there is no MALI

21:29 <edwin> aah now I found the reddit discussion and the trisquel discussion: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/future-libre-computing-crowd-funding-campaign-starts-now#comment-99708 https://www.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comments/4qhm1y/earthfriendly_eoma68_computing_devices/