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NXP dev board T2080 e6500 with Debian sid PPC64 and RadeonHD

Posted on by Communications Team

This is our first successful attempt to setup a T2080rdb with a video card.
The RadeonHD 5450 is attached to the onboard PCI Express Gen3 4x connector using a 16x cable adapter.

We are using this board as it uses the same CPU (NXP T2080) as the one selected for our Open Hardware laptop project

You may find more infos about the board here
https://www.nxp.com/support/developer-resources/software-development-tools/qoriq-developer-resources/qoriq-t2080-reference-design-board:T2080RDB

The system is a Debian sid PPC64 with packages available in the following repositories
http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/

Few software did not works without applying patches to make them work properly under PPC64 (see Midori, Firefox, Iceweasel, VLC, mplayer), so we setup our own repository
https://repo.powerprogress.org/

 

This the output of the Hardinfo 0.6 alpha benchmarks, compared to a PowerMac G5 (IBM 970) and a three years old intel laptop (i7-4600U).

T2080rdb, cpu T2080 e6500 1.8Ghz, 4 cores, 8 threads, altivec
RadeonHD 5450 1GB DD3, on the oboard PCIe 4x using a 4x to 16x adaptor
Debian Sid PPC64

CPU Blowfish 5.38
CPU CryptoHash 338.35
CPU Fibonacci 2.96
CPU N-Queens 3.63
CPU Zlib 0.41
FPU FFT 8.46
FPU Raytracing 2.85
GPU Drawing 1219.24

PowerMac G5, cpu PowerPC 970 1.8Ghz, 2 cores, 2 threads, altivec
ATI Radeon 9600 PRO 128MB AGP
Debian Sid PPC64

CPU Blowfish 32.81
CPU CryptoHash 78.82
CPU Fibonacci 3.11
CPU N-Queens 26.01
CPU Zlib 0.15
FPU FFT 10.29
FPU Raytracing 12.94
GPU Drawing 699.74

HP EliteBook 840 G1, cpu i7-4600U 2.10GHz, 2 cores, 4 threads
Intel HD Graphics 4400
Ubuntu 18.04

CPU Blowfish 3.89
CPU CryptoHash 341.53
CPU Fibonacci 0.59
CPU N-Queens 5.67
CPU Zlib 0.52
FPU FFT 1.95
FPU Raytracing 2.06
GPU Drawing 7973.70

Now some remarks
1) The Debian Sid was set up on the PowerMac G5 then, the 2.5’HD was attached to the T2080rdb onboard SATA. We used a vanilla 4.17.6 kernel image customized for this board (no patch applied) and a modified Device tree blob stored on the onboard SD card. You may find the U-Boot kernel image (uImage) and the Device tree (uImage.dtb) in our GitLab account
https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/T2080customizations/
2) Not figured out (yet) how to go online using the T2080rdb onboard ethernet ports.
3) Games such as Chromium BSU or NeverBall simply works. Games such as SuperTuxKart does not start, Torcs is slow and the audio is completely corrupt
4) The T2080rdb works well with the RadeonHD 5450, but many errors floods the serial console whenever trying to plug in other RadeonHD cards (e.g. 4550, R7 250E which is a rebranded HD7750).

This is the error that floods the serial console:
pcieport 0001:00:00.0: AER: Corrected error received: id=0000
pcieport 0001:00:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, id=0000(Receiver ID)
pcieport 0001:00:00.0: device [1957:0830] error status/mask=00000001/00006000
pcieport 0001:00:00.0: [ 0] Receiver Error (First)

Collaborate with us

If you like to help on fix debian packages for powerpc (ppc64 be expecially) or help on improve kernel configuration , u-boot(menu,etc) or others configurations to run more video cards, etc… contact us.

You can even select which type of collaboration you like to make, in case please fill our collaboration survey.

Electrical Schematic engineering task started! thanks to ACube Systems

Posted on by Guillermo Amat

Thanks to the already received donations ACube has received a payment to start the study of the components list. In relation with this, Power Progress Community has provided a possible component list based on non NDA chips to manage usb3, sata3, audio and others. Electrical Schematic engineering task started! Starting on Monday 7th August, ACube is analyzing that information and will produce feedback and suggestions.

Milano, 10th August 2017, Power Progress Community association is announcing the official collaboration of Acube Systems SRL through a contract signature to create the electrical schematics of the GNU Linux PowerPC Notebook. The project involving both organizations will create a PowerPC laptop featuring an MXM video card whereas the current phase is expected to produce the complete electrical  schematics for this computer.

Electrical Schematic engineering task started

https://www.flickr.com/photos/sumofmarc/7841135420

Power Progress Community wants to thank again for the big and passionate collaboration of all the volunteers and donors that made this happen. “As the expected period to complete the electrical schematics is 10 weeks, now it’s in our hands that means also in donors’ and collaborators’  hands to reach the 12600€ goal in less or equal time.” stated Roberto Innocenti, president of Power Progress Community association.

ACube Systems was already collaborating in the preliminary tasks and supporting the association. Enrico Vidale, CEO at ACube Systems said “Since a long time we wanted to build a PowerPC laptop. Thanks to the Power Progress Community, the dream will become true. We are excited about the future!”

Power Progress Community is a non-profit association composed by people contributing on a voluntary basis, and inspired by the Open Source Hardware and Software movement. The mission is not focused on selling products, and the contribution to the “PowerPC Notebook” is an example. The Power Progress Community is working to establish and consolidate a potential purchasing group big enough to motivate a manufacturer to start the building process. In addition, the Power Progress Community association is supporting a crowdfunding campaign for designing and prototyping the laptop, as well as encouraging the open source developers in supporting the PowerPC platform.

ACube Systems S.r.l., a world-renowned company, was established in January 2007. The main goal of ACube Systems is to create and promote innovative hardware and software products thanks to an in-house research and development team supported by collaborations with some well-known Italian and international teams.

The Power of making Progress is in the hand of our Community.

  1. Design PowerPC notebook Motherboard

    Donation Campaign for the Electrical Schematics of a PowerPC Notebook motherboard
    €13,874.70 donated

    Read More

First engineering task to be started soon

Posted on by Guillermo Amat
First engineering task to be started soon

https://www.flickr.com/photos/takkaria/

After reaching the 4000€ milestone we are ready to sign our first contract with ACube Systems. This will allow to start the engineering work and we want to thank all the donors for making this possible! All supporters are contributing to keep us moving enthusiastically forward. Of course, we still need to achieve the 12600€ goal to end up the analysis phase and to produce the complete electrical schematics and deliver an extensive documentation, but we feel confident in our long term success.

In the meantime we are making progress on our T2080  CPU based development boards. We are working on  booting them  with a Radeon graphic card, so please, if some  uboot expert  like to contribute, please contact us .

Regarding the Radeon card, a few days ago ACube confirmed the inclusion of an MXM connector in the notebook. This is a very good point, as it gives us the possibility to deliver the basis for an upgradeable laptop.

Finally, we would like to end this article reminding that any  help is more than welcome. New members joined us to collaborate with the hardware team (i.e. the above mentioned boot process) and many people are contributing in spreading our campaign in the  social networks. We need to reach more donors as they will help us reaching our goal and to release a truly Open Source PowerPC Notebook. So please, tell everybody about this project on forums, social networks, and why not, have a chat about it with your friends during these summer evenings.

News to share from our “social” pages:
http://twitter.com/powerpcnotebook
http://www.facebook.com/powerpcnotebook/
https://plus.google.com/communities/103352717884355831498
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7300932

If you like to collaborate with us or give us some suggestions you can fill our survey.

In any case if you subscribe the newsletter you will receive updates from us.

 

  1. Design PowerPC notebook Motherboard

    Donation Campaign for the Electrical Schematics of a PowerPC Notebook motherboard
    €13,874.70 donated

    Read More

The fundraising of the PowerPC Notebook reaches a 20% of its goal in six days

Posted on by Guillermo Amat

The fundraising of the PowerPc Notebook has reached a 20% of its goal in six days. This is a good starting point but we need you to spread our project to achieve our target.

Remember this campaign is trying to lead to a fully open source hardware. Releasing a complete laptop product as Open Source is an important step that people will forward across the globe. So this project is important to spread the open source philosophy. Do not miss this opportunity. Donate now!.

In another vein, we are tracking the campaign and following what people says in social networks. Some of you have expressed some concerns because there is no refund if the campaign fails. As we have explained in the FAQ of the campaign page, if we cannot reach the sum of 12600€ we will use the money to fund a similar project in the scope of the association (Power Progress Community) mission. As is stated in the statutes (ART 3):

“The Association promotes and disseminates software (especially open source software), and open hardware (with focus on, but not limited to, PowerPC and OpenPower architectures) with the aim of sharing knowledge and expertise.”

There are also discussions about the final specs of the machine. We cannot give all the details because is the objective of this stage to determine what components to include. So what we can do right now is to clarify that we want to have an MXM connector for the graphic card but we cannot guarantee that it will be finally included.

We are in the good way! Just remember that everything will start after we reach the 12600€ goal and we are very close to that. Do not hesitate to contact us to ask or comment whatever.

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

Posted on by Guillermo Amat

We are very happy to announce that our funding campaign has just started. Starting today, we will accept donations through our campaign page with the objective of collecting funds to establish a contract with Acube Systems to design the PowerPC Notebook motherboard.

It has been a long way and we feel we are only starting. We wanted to reach this point many months ago but we found some difficulties and we tried to find solutions for all of them. In this time we have created our non profit association (Power Progress Community), we started a preliminary task for selecting hardware components, we have identified people to maintain a Linux distribution, we contacted companies and organizations and of course, we received you support in our website, in our facebook page, in the forum and other social networks.

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

After all this work and solving all these issues we are ready to collect the money required to start the engineering process. In the end, it is not the intention of this blog entry to explain all the details here so, we invite you to find all the information in the  campaign page: https://fundraising.powerpc-notebook.org/

Thank you very much for your support and enthusiasm.

Update regarding the crowdfunding

Posted on by Casper Steuperaert

Dear readers, members of the community

As you know, we last stated that it was our goal to begin the crowdfunding campaign in May. We have settled on the way in which we want to conduct our crowdfunding, which is a combination of recurring and non-recurring crowdfunding over time to fund the development of the laptop. We’re not aiming a campaign constricted in a short time as we felt that would not go well with self-hosting our crowdfunding. This manner of crowdfunding is comparable with Patreon donations or the manner in which organizations like Haiku Inc. are funded.

For us it is important to take a while to coordinate this with our manufacturer, to finalize an exhaustive text and to produce a video to explain the fundraising. Due to this we are delaying the start as we’re sorting this out at the moment. We need some more days to complete these tasks and to set up the online donation campaign.

 

A small delay is no delay

Our aim is launching the campaign sometime in June, but we will keep you updated as we make progress.

Our apologies for the delay, we thank you for your patience and stay tuned! 😀

 

First crowdfuding campaign to start in May

Posted on by Roberto Innocenti

We are happy to announce that we are finishing all the tasks required to launch our first crowdfunding campaign.

As you might know at this stage we will financing the electrical engineering and schematics of the motherboard.  This work will be carried by ACube Systems if the campaign goal is achieved.

The campaign will be hosted in our current website and these days we are closing some requirements for the launch such as the WordPress plugin, text contents, videos and the secure payments integration through Paypal. We expect to have all ready during the second half of May.

crowdfunding

Creative Commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/planeta/8047889850

 

PowerPC Notebook Crowdfunding – electrical schematics

Posted on by Roberto Innocenti

The Power Progress Community ( the non profit organization that we have founded in July 2016) will launch a crowdfunding campaign to finance the analysis of the system architecture, components selection and electrical schematics for the PowerPC Notebook.

76477 Demo Circuit-C

The decision has been taken after a voting process, inside our core team, celebrated the third week of March. The majority of the members voted to go ahead with the crowd funding as soon as possible.

This phase will be only the first step to achieve the whole design as the progress of selecting all the required components where taking too much time and energy from the project volunteers. If the funding objective is reached, this task will be done by ACube Systems in a timed boxed period.
Further details about this campaign will be published soon.

Power Progress Community cooperation with Acube Systems

Posted on by Roberto Innocenti

Power Progress Community publicly reveals its fruitful cooperation with ACube Systems, an Italian company producing its own line of PowerPC based motherboards. Since the beginning of the project, ACube Systems accepted to build our motherboard. We would like to thank the people of ACube for allowing us to pursue a transparent approach towards a purely Open Source Hardware project, aiming to publish and deliver all technical details of the hardware.

Power Progress Community collaboration with Acube Systems

Power Progress Community collaboration with Acube Systems

Our cooperation with ACube, in addition to the chance of building the hardware, gave us an experienced and passionate partner free of charge. Because of that, we also want to thank their continuous support and contribution to our project, allowing us to overcome the encountered difficulties.

So far, ACube is the only company we are cooperating with. In the near future, we wish to be able to establish new cooperation relationships with new associations and organizations sharing the same innovating spirit as our Power Progress Community.

Power Progress Community is a non-profit association composed by people contributing on a voluntary basis, and inspired by the Open Source Hardware and Software movement. The mission is not focused on selling products, and the contribution to the “PowerPC Notebook” is an example; here the Power Progress Community is working to establish and consolidate a potential purchasing group big enough to motivate a manufacturer to start the building process. In addition, the Power Progress Community association is supporting a crowdfunding campaign for designing and prototyping the laptop, as well as encouraging the open source developers in supporting the PowerPC platform.

ACube Systems S.r.l., a world-renowned company, was established in January 2007.
The main goal of ACube Systems is to create and promote innovative hardware and software products thanks to an in-house research and development team supported by collaborations with some well-known Italian and international teams.

Power Progress Community cooperation with Acube Systems

About Open Source Hardware

Posted on by Guillermo Amat

At the end of this past year we started to consider the possibility of making our motherboard Open Source Hardware (OSH). After discussing the idea with the hardware producer, both sides agreed that this was a good idea. We announced this new challenge at the beginning of the year and now we think is the perfect time to clarify the implications of making the motherboard Open Source Hardware. To explain it better, we are going to formulate and respond to a couple of questions.

What is open source hardware?

It seems difficult to explain what is OSH. A complete and detailed explanation can be found on the OSHWA definition page, but simplifying it even further, we can say that OSH is hardware made in such a way that its design is publicly available. Not only that, the documentation provided to understand and reproduce the device should be friendly, in terms of allowing its edition and improvements. So a PDF file containing the schematics is not enough to describe a hardware device as open source hardware. To open source a hardware project, the complete set of CAD and description files should be provided, enabling for instance the edition of the circuits. Of course if any firmware is used to make the hardware work it should be also available as open source code.

The problem for a project like ours is attempting to reach a complete degree of openness. A notebook uses many components which are created by third party companies and, as can be imagined, nearly all of them are under proprietary licenses. In many cases, if you want to use them you have to sign an NDA agreement with their maker (for instance, NXP for a PPC processor). Furthermore, the signature of an NDA means that you can not reveal particular pieces of information in relation to that item.

The OSHWA also refers to this particular problem when explaining the process of awarding a certificate to hardware for achieving the satus of being Open Source Hardware:

“However, that does not necessarily mean that the entire project must or will be open source. If the creators used third party closed components outside of their control, they are unable – and are therefore not required – to open source those components. While it is strongly prefered to use open components when possible, OSHWA recognizes the reality that this is not always possible”

So, what’s our plan?

We want to be as open as possible. We will publish all the CAD files, specifications and any other documentation in a way that could be usable. Of course we will share our source code too (firmware and drivers). On the other hand, we will not be able to make public any third party resources covered by an NDA.

One more thing we will do is give preference to any component that could be considered open source if it accomplishes what we need. However, we need to be practical too, so the selection could be a different component if the open source hardware component lacks desired features.

Finally, where are we in in this process?

As we announced a couple of weeks ago, we have constituted the Power Progress Community association this past summer and the members of the project are currently in the process of joining the assocation by completing our membership application and paying the yearly membership fee (30 Euro). WIth that, Roberto is currently presiding over the association and soon we will have the first NDA agreements signed.

Power Progress Community logo

Power Progress Community logo

Another important point to quickly cover is the list of hardware components for the PPC notebook. The selection of these components is not quite completed yet, but we now feel this aspect of the project is most important so it is currently our main focus. Once the list of hardware components is finalized we will release this information in another project update. Look for that in the very near future.