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Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

jeremymorgan.com

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Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#121

Post by slantyyz »

Balanceinfinity wrote: post #94
lanewinfield wrote: post #10

An "annoying touchpad" is likely a dealbreaker for me. It's the holy grail for Linux to me and I feel like it's never been solved by anybody but Apple (w/o Linux). That being said, I could exist in the command line most of the time...

Two words: trackball (or track-ball). Easiest on wrist and fingers for long days.

Trackballs are very underrated, imo.

While I'll admit Apple's trackpads have been the best laptop trackpads for the past several years, I personally hate trackpads. I always make sure I have a mouse in my laptop bag.

This is going to date me, but my very first laptop was a Powerbook 170, and damn, I loved its trackball.

For my desktop, I recently switched from a mouse to a Kensington trackball because I had some wrist issues using a mouse, and it's fantastic. I was concerned that my four monitor setup would be an issue moving the pointer from end to end, but it hasn't been an issue at all.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#122

Post by zozbot234 »

Youden wrote: post #37

This is a tad tangential but has anyone done extensive software development using an ARM device? I was able to get pretty far with a rooted Samsung tablet running Debian in a container (C++ development works great, you can install stuff like VSCode and Clang without too much trouble) but when it came to anything mobile, ironically it all fell apart because the Android toolchain isn't built for ARM64 (save the one in…

> but apparently Debian copies all the code into its own repositories and doesn't make clear how to update it.

Debian always keeps the maintainer's patches separate from the "clean" upstream code. I'm not saying that it can't sometimes be hard to do major updates but please don't blame the Debian folks for that, it's not cool.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#123

Post by fest »

smacktoward wrote: post #2

Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads. I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off…

Increasing a single cell battery system over 10Ah is not trivial. First, the RK3399 and it's companion PMIC is designed with single cell applications primarily.

Second, I don't know the exact reason why, but commonly available lithium cells top out at 10Ah. Even many fuel gauge ICs don't support cells larger than that.

Adding another cell requires substantial development (design/source the pack, balancing and charging circuit) and extra BOM cost, whereas single cell involves copying reference design (which I know because I'm designing hardware product around RK3399 and ~70Wh battery pack)

TL;DR; Can be done, but developers probably wanted to reduce the risk and stay on commonly walked path.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#124

Post by zozbot234 »

snogglethorpe wrote: post #48
nwrk wrote: post #35

Enjoyed the article. Thanks for write up. 4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks. I'm looking to switching to one of those devices in future, so far on trusted Thinkpad x230 (no FHD, $150 USD) for travel purposes. Can anyone comment on "no NPM yet that I know of though" ? Does node development work normally ?

Using a reasonable OS (Linux etc), 4GB is absolutely fine for browsing and basic tasks, and indeed is often fine for development and other more-than-basic tasks as well, depending on how exactly you work (Emacs/Vim instead of an IDE, for instance). Is 4GB considered too little under Windows these days?

4GB is terrible under Windows 10 (you'll be swapping all the time, which means either visibly thrashing if running a spinning disk, or wearing out a SSD with excess writes). 8GB is considered a mildly tolerable amount, and 16GB is almost the standard for "real" use. Yet under Linux, even as little as 2GB can make for an incredibly snappy and productive experience. Go figure.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#125

Post by seabrookmx »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #30

> You can’t fault the Pine64; everything has to be built for ARM and that’s still a work in progress. I eagerly await the day Visual Studio Code is available for ARM. Thankfully this is changing rapidly, thanks in part to raspberry pi desktops. Most, if not all, popular server apps are already available in ARM. Desktop apps will take time.

There's community builds: https://code.headmelted.com/

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#126

Post by anthk »

nwrk wrote: post #35

Enjoyed the article. Thanks for write up. 4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks. I'm looking to switching to one of those devices in future, so far on trusted Thinkpad x230 (no FHD, $150 USD) for travel purposes. Can anyone comment on "no NPM yet that I know of though" ? Does node development work normally ?

I use OpenBSD with cwm, Iridium, nvi and Unix utilities as my "IDE".

I lack nothing.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#127

Post by StillBored »

sneak wrote: post #116
StillBored wrote: post #108

The really nice thing is that the RK3399, while an old and not particularly fast ARM, has almost entirely open documentation. A bit of googling should land both parts of the TRM, which covers every bit of the SOC's registers and devices minus the Mali. The follow-on RK3588 announced last year with 4x A76's (and 4x A55s) in 8nm should completely crush the RK3399 performance wise. If it comes with open documentation to…

Does it use any proprietary blobs to boot? I have yet to see a GPU without them, and you said "almost", so I assume the answer is yes?

I don't think there are any binary blobs in the normal atf+uboot+kernel boot path. The display will run without the mali, so. AFAIK it can be run entirely open source. There could be some additional hidden burned in place firmware to handle the early SPI/etc boot flow, but they actually document the cortex M0 mgmt processor as well. So that puts them ahead of basically everyone.

Not all the documentation is "good" the DDR controller registers are in the docs AFAIK, but lack a theory of operation section.

OTOH, there is example code in TFA for that, https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git/...

So, really as far as I know this is literally the most open A72 platform out there when it comes to docs you can get via google. The MALI being the problem, which means that one could consider one of the reverse engineered QC chips or the rpi better understood (because of the Adreno or vp9 efforts) but even then the documentation quality is worse.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#129

Post by hajile »

floatboth wrote: post #105
hajile wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some web development work on my raspberry pi 4. It's almost there, but even using vim, some things are still too slow (I do primarily front-end development). 4gb of RAM means I can't have a ton of things going on, but it's easily enough for back-end, webpack, editor, and a handful of tabs without much issue. Now, there are some CPU differences here. 3399 has 2 A72 cores at 2GHz and 4 A53 cores at 1.5GHz. Th…

I would take 4xA72 over 2xA72+4xA53 any time. Heterogeneous systems are annoying. Linux probably has some fancy scheduler settings to prefer fast cores (??) but FreeBSD will happily schedule compile jobs onto the slow-ass A53 cores when the A72s are idle, which is annoying. UPD: NetBSD prefers fast cores now: https://twitter.com/mrgtwentythree/status/121661988693740339... 4xA72@2GHz is not bad for web development (I…

There is only 1 PCIe lane and it goes to the USB3 controller. Running from a SSD on USB3 isn't that bad, but they still haven't made default booting from USB possible yet.

I don't think RAM is an issue though. Performance seems to scale pretty much linearly with clockspeed improvements which indicates either the RAM timing is tied to the clockspeeds (seems unlikely) so bandwidth is increasing or it already has more than it can use. That said, rk3399 designs tend to get about 20% better performance (or around 1gb/s) on synthetics.

I'm surprised better IO doesn't exist on the chip if Broadcomm planned on selling it to other customers. I don't think a single SATA port would greatly increase costs, but would have a huge impact on performance.

As a final thought, they really need to consider mounting the RAM and CPU on the other side of the PCB. That would allow good cooling solutions that don't compromise the other board functionality.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#130

Post by zozbot234 »

StillBored wrote: post #127
sneak wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it use any proprietary blobs to boot? I have yet to see a GPU without them, and you said "almost", so I assume the answer is yes?

I don't think there are any binary blobs in the normal atf+uboot+kernel boot path. The display will run without the mali, so. AFAIK it can be run entirely open source. There could be some additional hidden burned in place firmware to handle the early SPI/etc boot flow, but they actually document the cortex M0 mgmt processor as well. So that puts them ahead of basically everyone. Not all the documentation is "good" th…

If there are no blobs in the "normal" path, why isn't this device supported by mainline Debian without special patches? Is this code making its way into kernel/bootloader upstream so that distros can pick it up?
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