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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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21–30 of 227 posts

Re: Why I left Pine64

#21

Post by xrd »

Thank you for all your efforts, Martin.

I'm left feeling like there is not a good way to align incentives for a world-changing project like Pine. It's really disappointing to read. I just yesterday setup my PinePhone with postmarketOS, and the sd card setup was so easy, and it is frustrating to hear there is absolute uncertainty about whether that be the case with future devices.

As a customer with three Pine devices (tablet, phone and watch), I'll definitely be writing to Pine and asking them to clarify what they as a company say about this post. Thanks for writing it up.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#22

Post by dcz_self »

With my Librem 5 developer hat on, I'm surprised that a SPI chip matters at all.

The Librem 5 eMMC contains a hidden "partition", which is preferred by the CPU to boot from over the "data partition" where the OS boot loader resides. It should be possible to put Tow-boot into this hidden area, and the OS stored in the data area will have no say. No separate flash chip needed to have an independent boot loader.

I wonder why the PinePhone needs a separate chip for this purpose. Is the CPU unaware of hidden areas on the eMMC?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#23

Post by MartijnBraam »

dcz_self wrote: post #22

With my Librem 5 developer hat on, I'm surprised that a SPI chip matters at all. The Librem 5 eMMC contains a hidden "partition", which is preferred by the CPU to boot from over the "data partition" where the OS boot loader resides. It should be possible to put Tow-boot into this hidden area, and the OS stored in the data area will have no say. No separate flash chip needed to have an independent boot loader. I wonde…

That does work on the original pinephone, the A64 SoC can boot from the mmcblk0boot0 partition. The rk3399 in the pinephone pro is way more problematic which it is why it's important to have the SPI and also have the SPI flashed from the factory.

The pinebook pro batch that has shipped now did not end up with Tow-Boot and instead has BSP u-boot on the eMMC which makes it unable to boot anything else than the shipped manjaro by default. Of course it's only the other distributions supporting this platform that have to deal with this

Re: Why I left Pine64

#24

Post by sigmaris »

dcz_self wrote: post #22

With my Librem 5 developer hat on, I'm surprised that a SPI chip matters at all. The Librem 5 eMMC contains a hidden "partition", which is preferred by the CPU to boot from over the "data partition" where the OS boot loader resides. It should be possible to put Tow-boot into this hidden area, and the OS stored in the data area will have no say. No separate flash chip needed to have an independent boot loader. I wonde…

The boot ROM in the RK3399 in the PinePhone Pro has a hardcoded boot order, and doesn't use the special boot partition of the eMMC - it only looks for a bootloader on the data partition at a fixed sector (64).

Re: Why I left Pine64

#25

Post by readingnews »

Hrm, where is there another "open source/hardware" phone that is not more than a new iPhone (e.g. not a libre phone)? I was really thinking about getting the Pine phone pro, but now I am a bit shaken.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#26

Post by ddevault »

xrd wrote: post #21

Thank you for all your efforts, Martin. I'm left feeling like there is not a good way to align incentives for a world-changing project like Pine. It's really disappointing to read. I just yesterday setup my PinePhone with postmarketOS, and the sd card setup was so easy, and it is frustrating to hear there is absolute uncertainty about whether that be the case with future devices. As a customer with three Pine devices…

> I'll definitely be writing to Pine and asking them to clarify what they as a company say about this post.

Please let us know what they say.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#27

Post by MartijnBraam »

readingnews wrote: post #25

Hrm, where is there another "open source/hardware" phone that is not more than a new iPhone (e.g. not a libre phone)? I was really thinking about getting the Pine phone pro, but now I am a bit shaken.

I think that the situation is not that bad that you should skip the PinePhone Pro, these are definetly things that can be fixed. There's also a lot more platforms with varying degrees of linux-ness. There's the PinePhone and Librem 5 which are the most well known but on postmarketOS there's now also mainline linux on a bunch of qualcomm devices and I think the mainlining community for those qualcomm platforms is at the moment way healthier than the pinephone one.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#29

Post by MartijnBraam »

3np wrote: post #19

Unless PINE64 changes course hard, I think this will be the moment they died, so to say. They may keep making SBCs etc alongside other vendors but the phones/tablets/laptops/watches/etc would continue being novelties and realistically majority e-waste. Really quite sad. If I'd name one single person in the FLOSS community who's done the most good for mobile open source, it'd be OP. Thank you so much for your service,…

I hope PINE64 doesn't fail, they did great before and I think they could continue being great.

luckily postmarketOS existed before the PinePhone and can easily exist after, the pine devices isn't even the majority of devices we support.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#30

Post by fullstop »

sgbeal wrote: post #9

Anecdote: i backed pine64's first-ever Kickstarter and got two of their A+ boards (i think they were called). They claimed high performance and full HD video. In the end i couldn't get a single Android game, no matter how primitive, to run at more than a couple of frames per second and Netflix was too jittery to watch. They've been on my poo-list ever since. About 18 months ago i pulled them back out and ran XFCE on…

I ran openHAB on mine for three or four years until I replaced it with a Pi4.

It was fantastic for that purpose, and I only migrated because openhabian stopped supporting Pine64.

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