Some may already be aware of it, since September 2016 I am member of the Purism Advisory Board and consulting Purism in matters of mobile devices. As development continues I have been asked beginning of 2017 if I could imagine to lead a mobile device development. After some further discussion about possibilities I started to lead a mobile device development… Read more »
You know, there is a lot of cruel stuff going on these days. Freedom is cut away in many places which in many cases is done by taking away power and control. Having full control over something means to have power and to have the freedom to use this power or not. The Intel ME is a technological implementation of… Read more »
Yesterday I finally received a Purism Librem 15 laptop for review. A few months before I also got a Librem 13 v1 which was already pretty nice but showed some details that I did not fully like for a device at that price point. The new Librem 15 v2 in contrast is a really nice device. First of all all,… Read more »
A client asked for more recent Linux kernel support for a Marvell Kirkwood/Orion 88F6281 based board made by KaRo, the TK71. This is a Q7 form factor CPU module running @ 1.2GHz with two GBit Ethernet ports, two SATA ports, USB2.0 and PCIe support. The TK71 usually comes with 256MB of RAM, a 512MB version is available upon request. The… Read more »
For a project I am currently evaluating embedded CPUs, so called system on chip (SOC), mostly ARM architecture. One major requirement of the project is to use free and open source software only, without any binary firmware blobs. Introduction You may have heard about the big issues found lately about e.g. the Intel Management Engine (ME) which is part of… Read more »
Well, I was aware that the Pinebook is not meant as a day to day laptop replacement. It is rather an experiment, targeted at enthusiasts and developers. Heck, I am both 🙂 So I like it! Despite software glitches and some (minor) hardware issues. But first start with what we get. The Pinebook comes with a 11.6″ or 14″ screen,… Read more »
Yippie! My brand new Pinebook 11,6″ arrived today! Very nice device. I am pretty impressed by the quality compared to the very low price of just US$89 (plus US$37 shipping plus German VAT and expenses of 36,44€ 🙁 The overall impression is pretty cool. It came with Android 6.1 pre-installed though I ordered it with Linux, i.e. a Linux flavor… Read more »
A little time ago I wrote about the S0ix and S0i3 modes for Intel SoC CPUs. I moved a small step forward. It seems indeed that the reason for the pretty high power drain in suspend, which is around 0.4W, has its roots in the system not entering S0i3. In S0i3 the power management controller (PMC) would not only stop… Read more »
For some time now I am working on the Thinkpad Tablet 10 with Linux. By now it works pretty nicely – apart from still happening freezes 🙁 One major annoyance though is the very bad power saving during standby aka suspend. What I found this far is that Linux relies on the ACPI BIOS support for the different power saving… Read more »
Good news! I finally managed to get battery readings! I finally gave up on trying to figure out what is wrong in kernel land and resorted to a userspace implementation. I think the kernel I2C ACPI operation region implementation is not really compatible with the TPT10 ACPI. After implementing my small userspace solution I now have a very vague idea… Read more »
