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Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

pine64.org

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Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#21

Post by zozbot234 »

noasaservice wrote: post #17
MartijnBraam wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cameras are far from "the simple stuff", it's one of the more complicated systems in mobile devices with multiple high speed components from different vendors that have to work together and not very much documentation for the hardware existing.

Admittedly, that's doubly concerning. Pine chooses the BoM; we don't. And if they're choosing unsupported/unsupportable chips without doing the barest of legwork to get them functional (or hell, get docs public), then that's a huge problem. Pine should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't. The Pinephone Pro doesn't qualify for the definition "phone". If they were serious, th…

> should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't.

inb4 What works: You tell me!

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#22

Post by ocdtrekkie »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #16
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

So they included all the hardware requested by Martijn. What remains the rub here?

I never said they didn't include SPI, it took an incredibly amount of arguing over several weeks to get it there on the PPP, then they again didn't want to ship it on the PBP. In the end the PBP does have SPI but still didn't ship with something flashed to it. While they did in the end listen and add SPI _after_ manjaro finally agreed. that doesn't mean they listened to the whole community. Ofcourse PINE64 and Manjar…

As their blog addresses, what was requested to ship on the chip apparently wasn't available in time?

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#23

Post by NoahKAndrews »

egberts1 wrote: post #13

As a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended. I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is not that option. Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem then so be it but it doesn’t. Still have the PinePhone…

Also, Tow-Boot is just a u-boot distribution that sticks pretty close to upstream.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#24

Post by MartijnBraam »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #22
MartijnBraam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said they didn't include SPI, it took an incredibly amount of arguing over several weeks to get it there on the PPP, then they again didn't want to ship it on the PBP. In the end the PBP does have SPI but still didn't ship with something flashed to it. While they did in the end listen and add SPI _after_ manjaro finally agreed. that doesn't mean they listened to the whole community. Ofcourse PINE64 and Manjar…

As their blog addresses, what was requested to ship on the chip apparently wasn't available in time?

Well the issue with this happening in private telegram channels is that this will now turn into a "he said" "they said" situation, none of this happened publicly and neither side can provide sources. At the time the argument was definitely not that the chips weren't available.

Instead of delaying the PPP production by one day to get U-Boot sorted they decided to not ship mainline U-Boot at all. Which was only possible because Manjaro provided them with an image to ship with that.

In the end the only response there is is a blog post that never claims anything is wrong or should happen differently, after acknowledging all that I've done.

I only wrote why I left, that they themselves think they're manjaro focussed because the hardware that can't ship Linux doesn't ship manjaro doesn't change that this whole behind the scenes situation really burned me out, and I left.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#25

Post by reitanuki »

I am a big fan, but I also find this situation and the response to be a bit disappointing.

I highly respect Martijn and the effort he has poured into pmOS and Pine64 and surrounding projects. Without wanting to make other important people feel left out, I consider him an absolute legend and the fact that he has felt compelled to write this blog post (and, unfortunately, to leave) is massively concerning.

I think it's very possible that there has been no malice here and it's all just an accident of one thing leading to another, but something has gone awry here and I think it would be nice to hear what Pine intend to do to put it right, or to know that there is such a plan at all.

> As for the reason why Pinebook Pro doesn’t ship with a bootloader on SPI – it isn’t caused by favoritism for a particular group of developers or disregard for good ideas, but rather something more trivial. Namerly, a functional Tow-Boot build for the Pinebook Pro wasn’t available at the time of manufacture and shipping.

One particular point I want to make: I'm willing to believe Pine about the above, but it's too late to hear about this after crucial people have been miffed. This seems to indicate that communication with the various projects has not been good. This seems like a crucial thing to improve on to prevent this recurring.

I don't have enough knowledge of the situation and am incapable of making any judgements as to what is really going on, but I sincerely hope that Pine will consider this situation carefully and whether something can be done to put things right again.

I really wish to see Pine and their hardware do well and flourish. That was never going to be easy, but it will be even less easy with the loss of people like Martijn.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#26

Post by MartijnBraam »

reitanuki wrote: post #25

I am a big fan, but I also find this situation and the response to be a bit disappointing. I highly respect Martijn and the effort he has poured into pmOS and Pine64 and surrounding projects. Without wanting to make other important people feel left out, I consider him an absolute legend and the fact that he has felt compelled to write this blog post (and, unfortunately, to leave) is massively concerning. I think it's…

There has been zero communication towards Tow-Boot developers during this process, nothing about the issues on the new batch. The moment Tow-Boot learned about this is when people received the new Pinebook Pro and it came with a different bootloader.

This is a massive communication issue.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#27

Post by ocdtrekkie »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #24
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As their blog addresses, what was requested to ship on the chip apparently wasn't available in time?

Well the issue with this happening in private telegram channels is that this will now turn into a "he said" "they said" situation, none of this happened publicly and neither side can provide sources. At the time the argument was definitely not that the chips weren't available. Instead of delaying the PPP production by one day to get U-Boot sorted they decided to not ship mainline U-Boot at all. Which was only possibl…

You have every right to leave, and obviously if you're feeling burnt out, you made the right call for yourself. But it is frustrating that it seems like a distro preference issue has expanded into what will probably end up selling more proprietary phones at the end of the day.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#28

Post by MartijnBraam »

candiddevmike wrote: post #20
egberts1 wrote: post #13

As a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended. I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is not that option. Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem then so be it but it doesn’t. Still have the PinePhone…

What is the current state of bootloaders for ARM?

Messy

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#29

Post by jeroenhd »

I'm a bit confused by the whole bootloader situation. Locking down a bootloader on an open device seems quite bad, but what's the issue here exactly? The user can install any bootloader they want, can't they? I know the ARM bootloader system isn't anything like the PC bootloader system, but even if the bootloader is loaded from eMMC, in what way is the user impeded?

I would guess all the user should need to do to use their own bootloader is to pacman -R manjaro-arm-uboot and pacman -S pmos-uboot to hand over control of the bootloader image if you buy a device flashed with Manjaro, or overwrite the eMMC bootloader with one that manually tries to boot from the SD card before resuming normal boot?

It seems that the frustrations about Manjaro go further than just the bootloader but I don't really understand why a SPI flash chip would even be a necessity in the first place.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#30

Post by MartijnBraam »

jeroenhd wrote: post #29

I'm a bit confused by the whole bootloader situation. Locking down a bootloader on an open device seems quite bad, but what's the issue here exactly? The user can install any bootloader they want, can't they? I know the ARM bootloader system isn't anything like the PC bootloader system, but even if the bootloader is loaded from eMMC, in what way is the user impeded? I would guess all the user should need to do to use…

I've written about the SPI situation before on https://tuxphones.com/booting-arm-linux-the-standard-way/
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