Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Open hardware.
I figure someone might as well go whole-hog on that and build a PC with just a big ol' FPGA.
That is being done too for when trust REALLY matters.
See the Precursor.
GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
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Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#12I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
Yeah! Let's not fix the software and the bad assumptions some programmers make - let's all just do what's simplest for the bad programmers. What could go wrong? ;)
Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in code. All good code compiles and runs on whatever endian system you want. If it doesn't, then it's buggy and broken and should be fixed, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#13That website is a trainwreck on mobile firefox. Two screen-covering popups and wrong language detection.
Same on Safari. That's not how one should do it in 2021…
Welp, I'll just skip the article then.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#14[deleted]
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#15Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the…
They are not aiming for the "ultrabook" form factor, but rather the mobile workstation form factor.
According to the leaflet from NXP, the CPU has a "typical" power consumption of ~15W - if that means under load, it would be in the ballpark of Intel and AMD mobile CPUs, as far as I understand.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#16I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
Yeah! Let's not fix the software and the bad assumptions some programmers make - let's all just do what's simplest for the bad programmers. What could go wrong? ;) Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in code. All good code compiles and runs on whatever endian system you want. If it doesn't, then it's buggy and broken and should be fixed, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed.
>Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in code
How about wanting to share binary blobs between architectures without spending the effort to marshal things.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#17I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
PowerPC has been settling on powerpc64le lately for that reason. Is be surprised if little endian isn't at least an option, if not the default.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figure someone might as well go whole-hog on that and build a PC with just a big ol' FPGA.
Fpgas are very unsuitable general purpose computers. De10 nano is a very beefy fpga and can barely play doom acting like a general purpose 486 and lacks a fpga
Oh well, I figured that a PowerPC Notebook was for hobbyists.
What I would find fascinating is to think about languages and OSs for FPGA and try to break loose from the utterly boring C/Unix/68k,x86,MIPS,blah paradigm. Having something turnkey with attachment to various ports and a display would be kind of cool. Maybe that exists already.
I worked on a project with a processor-on-an-FPGA and while it wasn't fast, the video codec in FPGA made it useful. Kind of a neat thing I think.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#19I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
Yeah! Let's not fix the software and the bad assumptions some programmers make - let's all just do what's simplest for the bad programmers. What could go wrong? ;) Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in code. All good code compiles and runs on whatever endian system you want. If it doesn't, then it's buggy and broken and should be fixed, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed.
I agree with this in principle, that good code should be endian neutral, but if the goal of the project is to produce something that's broadly useful as a "real laptop" then this is a serious concern, as a lot of software is either bugged or straight up broken on big endian.
Fixing all the broken software and making all of GNU/Linux bug-free is a noble cause, and one FOSS contributors all want I'm sure, but people who are interested should know just how much software is broken on BE. It's not a tiny handful of packages. It's not a ton either, FWIW, but the broken packages tend to be the larger, more complex application software that IMO your average end user will want, especially if you're marketing this laptop for general users and not specifically to programmers or others willing to compromise on software.
It's not an insurmountable challenge, especially 64-bit PPC which works okay in BE, as there are enough diehard PPC64 users keeping the patches flowing to keep it working. But some things will never work without incredible porting efforts, and some of the things that work have issues.
Re: GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
#20I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
PowerPC has been settling on powerpc64le lately for that reason. Is be surprised if little endian isn't at least an option, if not the default.
Unfortunately the SoC they've chosen, while technically supporting little endian, doesn't include the VMX extensions to the ISA IIRC, which all (?) distros require as they generally assume ppc64le = POWER8 or higher, which include VMX. There may be other caveats, but at the very least, you'd need a custom distro to get LE working on it, with special build flags used to restrict it to Altivec instructions.