CE mark certification financed! New campaign for the software part and heat pipes

Posted on by Communications Team

Once again we want to thank you all for the great support and great enthusiasm you demonstrated during the CE mark donation campaign. We ended the campaign with a total amount of 12500€ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking), this is a huge milestone for us all and we are so very grateful.

By financing the CE mark certification you have shown us that you believe in the project and our vision of creating a fully open hardware notebook motherboard based on the alternative PowerPC CPU architecture.

We closed the campaign with around € 4000 more than expected, and this extra money will cover some of the extra and unplanned costs we faced for the increased price of electronic components and the extra costs of the three MXM video cards (360 USD each).

The CE mark certification is a mandatory requirement for selling electronic products in the European Union. It ensures that our notebook motherboard meets the safety, health and environmental standards of the EU. Without it, ACube Systems would not be able to launch and sell our Notebook on the EU market. Getting the CE mark certification is not an easy nor a cheap process as it involves rigorous testing, documentation and quality controls.

Legacy Slimbook Eclipse cooling metal pipes to be redesigned

However, the CE certification process can be performed only when the product can be considered completely finished, and that means once the board works, the cooling metal pipes are in place and all is assembled into the selected slimbook eclipse chassis.

Current activities

The Tyche Motherboard has surpassed all the electrical checks, and now the the key activities being performed concentrate on the hardware initialization procedures.

The start-up ramp was carefully calibrated, programming a complex integrated circuit with some logic (i.e. ramps, voltage thresholds, internal ways of making the PWM regulator work, and so on).

The Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a Lattice LCMXO640C-3TN100C FPGA is programmed to manage all external peripherals connected to it (see the block diagram and wiring diagram on page 15), manage the interrupts, data, boot reads, set resources according to the CPU and is able to reset all peripherals.

our Tyche motherboard under testing

Working on U-Boot

Currently, a small team of volunteers are working on U-Boot . We are decided to buy a JTAG debugger, a quite useful tool indeed that will make the hardware debugging much easier.

We learnt how to configure and build U-Boot, and we set up a cross-development PowerPC toolchain and the related Device Tree Blob that is used to describe the physical configuration of each hardware component available on the motherboard. You may keep an eye on our attempts by looking at our GitLab pages. We started by re-compiling our old U-Boot binary dating back to 2019, the one that we are currently using on our NXP T2080RDB devkit and also trying to compile a newer U-Boot version from a the DENX mainline vanilla branch without our patches. We are now kindly assisted by Max Tretene, the same guy working at ACube Systems that compiles U-Boot for their motherboards such as the Sam440 or the Sam460ex. Max is currently available to introduce hardware support to AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards in U-Boot, (ndr.: he recently told us that his spare times is not enough so we are proposing him to work under payment) stay tuned for more in-depth posts about it. In the hope of speeding up the development, we provided Max Tretene with our NXP T2080RDB devkit in early June.

We want to thank the dedicated small group of volunteers and especially Max Tretene for their precious spare time spent in trying to configure and compile U-Boot, we very much appreciate their availability and effort, even if a successful result is yet to comes. In addition, we greatly appreciated the offer made by a professional engineer – not to be disclosed yet- that is ready to work for us on U-Boot for a very reasonable amount of money.

Launch of a new fundraising campaign

After quite some internal discussion, we finally decided to launch a new fundraising campaign aimed at support and speeding up multiple actions:

  1. Buy a JTAG Debugger
  2. Design of the heat pipes for cooling down both the CPU and the video card;
  3. Prototype of a heat pipe fitting our Slimbook chassis, a requirement to proceed to the CE certification process;
  4. Development of an AMD/ATI Radeon driver for U-Boot;
  5. Development of the device thee to fully exploit each hardware component of the board;
  6. Compile a custom  U-Boot binary from up-to-date DENX sources;
  7. Provide the entire toolchain for cross compiling U-Boot and the device tree for PowerPC;
  8. Provide the documentation detailing all the technical aspects of both U-Boot and the device tree so that anybody will be able to understand how to rebuild it from scratch and how to customize it.

In carrying out these actions, we will try our best to optimize both the support of the involved volunteers (any additional help is more than welcome!) and the contracted software engineer(s).

At the moment we only have a rough idea of the amount of required hours of paid work required to complete U-Boot and its closely related device tree. After some internal investigation, a reasonable rough estimate could be at least 100 hours, but it may take more to reach the goal.

We do not have yet a formal quotation of the design of the heat pipes for cooling down both the CPU and the MXM video card. During an informal discussion with electronic engineers that have experience in the design and production of these heat pipes, we estimated approximately 10000 euros.

To sum up, the title of next campaign is “Development of software components and heat pipes for the Powerboard Tyche” and its breakdown costs are the following:

  • Around 100 hours of work of a software engineer(s) for the customized U-Boot, the device tree and the AMD/ATI Radeon video driver: 5000 euros
  • JTAG debugger 1000 euro
  • design of the heat pipes and production of 3 of them for the three prototypes: 10000 euro

The estimated amount to collect with the next campaign is 16000 euros.

  1. Development of software components and fix boot up for the Powerboard Tyche
    €12,810.00 donated of €14,000.00 goal

We really hope that you will assist us once again during this final journey. We are that close to making it happen: a 64 bit, multi core, PowerPC based notebook fully open hardware with up to today’s standards devices and interfaces!

Prototypes testing results

Posted on by Communications Team

Picture by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

The laptop prototypes testing is progressing great. We tested the primary power supply stage of the CPU, one the most power hungry components in the board, and it is being fine-tuned thanks to a programming apparatus. The chip in charge to power up the CPU NXP T2080 is the Texas Instruments TPS544B20RVFT (Switching Voltage Regulators 4.5-18V 20A SWIFT) as explained at page 37 in our electrical schematics.

The start-up ramp needs to be carefully calibrated, a complex integrated circuit with a some logic that needs to be programmed to make it work properly (i.e. ramps, voltage thresholds, internal ways of making the PWM regulator work, and so on).

The other power supplies are a half a dozen voltage regulators and are meant to power elements such as the PCIe, the RAM, the internal peripheral buses, the connected devices, the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and the clock generators the are essential to make the board work properly. The Eclipse Legacy Battery was tested and is recharging properly.

The Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a Lattice LCMXO640C-3TN100C FPGA and has to be programmed to manage all those external peripherals connected to it (see the block diagram and wiring diagram on page 15 ), manage interrupts, data, boot reads, set resources according to the CPU and reset all peripherals.

Powerboard Tyche, top side. The visible biggest gray chip is the CPU NXP T2080 Power Architecture CPU.

So far so good, the electronic design seems to work correctly, at the moment we are only fine-tuning each electronic component. If all checks continues like this, we might end all electronic debugging in the next few weeks and we can consider this very delicate phase successfully completed. After that, we plan to place the first code in the CPLD, and right after that we should be ready to load U-Boot, the first-stage and second-stage bootloader. We are trying to re-patch a recent version of U-Boot, quite some time has passed since we patched it to make it recognizing the graphic board we mounted on the PCIe port on the NXP T2080RDB board. Not just that, we must carefully customize the device tree to correctly map all peripherals available on the motherboard.

If for it concern the electronical components we can safely rely on the (paid) support of an expert engineer, for setting up U-Boot it’s up to us to make it work properly, and more importantly, to make it correctly recognize all peripherals, especially the SD card, the FLASH and, even more importantly, the two DDR3L RAM slots.

We would like to thank everyone for the continuous flow of donations, and please, continue to do so.

At the moment we still need funding to cover the extra costs we faced for the simply crazy prices we paid for the electronical components mounted on the prototypes motherboards and especially for getting our hands on two MXM graphic boards based on AMD chips.

For two MXM AMD E9174 video cards with 4GB RAM we have spent 780 dollars ( 360 each) and 185 euro of import Tax around 965 euro .Considering all chips, the cost of each prototype resulted 1200 euros higher than what was initially planned 4392 euros more (1200 x 3 + 22% VAT). So we need to collect around 5357 euro more than the goal of the last donation campaign.

Donations and professional for u-boot

In addition, after an initial round of experiments, we are still struggling to successfully customize U-Boot and to properly setup the device tree. Most of us already spent quite some time on the task during our spare time (remember, we are all volunteers with a proper day job and a personal life ;), so we are seriously evaluating to assign the job to a professional to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time, and to do that we need your financial support!

Prototypes ready, let’s proceed to test them.

Posted on by Communications Team

Finally, the three prototypes are ready as you can clearly see from the pictures below.

The resulting cost of each prototype resulted in 1200 euros (without VAT) higher than what was initially planned due to the global shortages of electronic components that have skyrocketed prices of some important chips. So, more donations are needed to fund these 4392 euros more (1200 x 3 + 22% VAT).

Powerboard Tyche, bottom side.
Powerboard Tyche, top side. The visible biggest gray chip is the CPU NXP T2080 Power Architecture CPU.

Now the Hardware Tests stage has started, but prior to that we still need to solder the HDMI connector that has arrived too late to be included during the production phase.

Soon, our Open Hardware motherboard called “Powerboard Tyche” will be inserted in its notebook body chassis for starting the multiple hardware tests.
Below, you can see a picture of the old dummy PCB used for testing how to fit in the notebook.

Slimbook Eclipse Notebook
The external view of the Notebook body

The notebook specifications are the following:

  • CHASSIS: Slimbook Eclipse notebook case 15,6”
  • CPU: NXP T2080, e6500 64-bit Power Architecture with Altivec technology
    • 4 x e6500 dual-threaded cores, low-latency backside 2MB L2 cache, 16GFLOPS x core
  • RAM: 2 x DDR3L SO-DIMM slots
  • VIDEO: MXM3 Radeon HD Video Card (removable)
  • AUDIO: C-Media 8828 sound chip, audio IN and audio OUT jacks
  • USB: 3.0 and 2.0 ports
  • STORAGE:
  • NETWORK:
    • 1 x Gigabit ethernet RJ-45 connector
    • WiFi connectivity
    • Bluetooth connectivity
  • POWER: on-board battery charger and power-management

Powerboard Tyche PCB source

This work was made using Mentor Expedition and it is ready and uploaded into our repository with all reported issues fixed, including issue number 5, the last one corrected . Thanks to our collaborators we are able to export this work using Altium form so the next days we will publish it and we will try to convert it to Open Source Kicad format ( and probably loosing something in the conversion process) . In our older post we have give more details regarding the PCB sources.

Prototypes in production despite heavy chip shortages

Posted on by Communications Team

We were supposed to start the production of the laptop prototypes at the end of last September but we stumble upon skyrocketing prices, especially regarding four fundamental chips. We had no other choice but to pay those incredible much higher prices, the only alternative would have been to stop all our activities.

We are glad to inform you that this week the prototypes production has started and – finger crossed – we are expecting them to be ready in the beginning of November. The following are the four fundamental chips and their actual cost:

  • Marvell Sata 3 controller 88SE9235A1-NAA2C000, around 130 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
  • TPS544B20RVFT 4.5-V to 18-V, 20-A synchronous SWIFT™ buck converter with PMBus programmability and monitoring around 550 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
  • 6-port, 12-lane, PCIe 2.0 Packet Switch PI7C9X2G612GP – Diodes around 250 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
  • Surge Suppressors 100V OV, UV, OC and Reverse Supply Protection Controller with -50mV Reverse Threshold LTC4368IDD-1#PBF around 100 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces

The HDMI connectors (2041481-1) were completely impossible to find on the market in a reasonable amount of time. After long research, we could finally solve the problem thanks once again to the kind support of Slimbook, they will soon send us three connectors, one for each prototype.

Considering all chips, the cost of each prototype resulted 1200 euros higher than what was initially planned, 3600 euros more ( + 22% VAT) considering all three prototypes currently in production. You may find more information about these three prototypes in the post of July 2022 and May 2022.

As already stated in our post back in July, we are still asking you to continue donating as to help us supporting the dramatic increase in the actual costs we personally anticipated to proceed with the production. You may continue use the current campaign to donate.

Our presence for October-November in Free Software and IT events

We have planned our next speech at the LinuxDay in Milan (Italy) on the 22nd of October.

We are at NXP Technology Days in Milano on 27th October with our exposition, we are very glad for this opportunity that NXP has given us.

We hope to first show at least one prototype at the SFScon – Free Software Conference – on the 11th of November in Bolzano (Italy) in the occasion of our next speech.

Ready for Prototypes production with reworked PCB design with all available components

Posted on by Communications Team
Image by Dmitry Abramov from Pixabay

AMD MXM video cards in our hands!

As we have already published in July’s post, our AMD retailer informed us that the new MXM video cards will not be available. We have selected a manufacturer that still produce and sell affordable MXM AMD based video cards (Type A – size 82mm x 70mm) .

At the moment, AMD open source drivers are better than NVIDIA ones, so in our opinion it is the best option for GNU/Linux and the unique solution to support Amiga OS derivates. Then, even if it is easier to find NVIDIA MXM Video Cards ( Type A) we are still preferring to use AMD MXM video cards.

As a consequence, we have ordered and received two MXM AMD E9174 video cards with 4GB RAM, actually is the only option available as the 2GB version is not available anymore.

Main Features
AMD Embedded Radeon E9174
Supports DirectX 12, Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5, Open CL 2.0
MXM 3.0 Type A
Support for 5 outputs
128-bit width, 4GB, GDDR5 Memory

They are ready to be tested with our prototypes. We have spent 780 dollars ( 360 each) and 185 euro of import Tax. It was possible to buy them thanks to the last donations that surpassed the goal of the dedicated CE Certification donation campaign so, thanks again to all donors

Published Powerboard Tyche PCB reworked source

Finally, the reworked PCB design source of Powerboard Tyche with the updated available components is ready ( in older posts you can go more deep about “our” electronic components shortage issues). This work was made using Mentor Expedition and it is ready and uploaded into our repository with all reported issues fixed, including issue number 5, the last one corrected . Thanks to our collaborators we are able to export this work using Altium form so the next days we will publish it and we will try to convert it to Open Source Kicad format ( and probably loosing something in the conversion process) . In our older post we have give more details regarding the PCB sources.

Inside Output folder you can find many interesting files easy simple viewable like the “the plot separate sheet” CAM350/DFMSTREAM and the Motherboard Assembly TOP and BUTTOM.

As a conclusion now we have everything to produce and make the hardware tests in September.

Rework of the Powerboard Tyche schematics done and published

Posted on by Communications Team
Tyche, or Fortune.

As you know, we were having troubles to find a few components in the market, not only because of their availability, but also due to the increased price. After extensive research, the designer replaced the unavailable components. Unfortunately, we were forced to buy a few components with a premium.

Changes:

from TCA6408ARGTR 8-bit translating 1.65- to 5.5-V I2C/SMBus I/O expander to  PCA9539 16-bit I2 C-bus and SMBus low power I/O port with interrupt ( Page 15 pdf schematics)

from TPS56637RPAR Buck Switching Regulator IC Positive Adjustable 0.6V 1 Output 6A 10-PowerVFQFN with RT6222DHGJ6F Buck Switching Regulator IC Positive Adjustable 0.6V 1 Output 2A SOT-23-6 Thin, TSOT-23-6 ( Page 38 pdf schematics)

We remain stuck with a few overpriced components:

  • Marvell Sata 3 controller  88SE9235A1-NAA2C000
  • TPS544B20RVFT 4.5-V to 18-V, 20-A synchronous SWIFT™ buck converter with PMBus programmability and monitoring

The designer of the PCB should complete the work within the next two weeks and after that we should start producing the prototypes. Meanwhile, we have published the new schematics including the new components in our repo in pdf format and with ORCAD source.

And lastly, our AMD retailer informed us that the new MXM video cards will not be available. There are other manufacturers producing MXM cards based on AMD GPUs, we are evaluating quotes from different producers.

We are still welcome more donations!

Even after completing the current goal, we are leaving the campaign open to help reaching our next milestone.

Our upcoming goals are:

  • to buy a few MXM Video cards for the prototypes. We need new quotes, because AMD has stopped selling MXM cards, so we are already in contact with other manufacturers, next days we order it.
  • to redesign the heat pipes, as they will differ from the original specifications of the Eclipse Notebook.

Only if needed:

  • pay some work on u-boot configuration

Worst case scenario:

  • make a new version of the prototype.
  • any other unforeseen challenges.

We will refine the scope of the upcoming donation campaign once we have a clearer view of the situation as it develops: production of the prototypes, hardware tests, CE certifications. Meanwhile, we will leave our current donation campaign opened.

Powerboard Tyche rework completed by June

Posted on by Communications Team

Motherboard final name

In October 2020, we asked the community to join our forum and submit their suggestions to name our motherboard. The discussions were intense, and the suggestions were very diverse, covering everything betweeh mythology, fauna and flora, literature, music and technology.

We kept the pool running for a year, until we reached the threshold of 1000 votes. Check the final results here. After an inicial parsing of the suggestions by the core team, we realize that it’s incredibly difficult to name something. =)

Statue of Tyche, goddess of fortune At the stunning Archeology Museum in Istanbul, Turkey

Among the suggestions, we got Bellatrix (a star or a Harry Potter villain, depending on where you come from), Overture (a musical motif of energy and character), Phoenix (that could also become a mascot), and others…

After a few rounds of reminders, in the March 2022 Power Progress Community meeting we decided to mix the first name selected on the public vote and the third because the first and second alone were too generic, so the composed name of the board is POWERBOARD TYCHE.

The POWERBOARD name is self explanatory. Tyche is the Greek Goddess of Fortune, to whom good and bad events could be atributed. Initially, however, her role was to bring positive messages to people. Her Roman equivalent is Fortuna.

We look forward to seeing our POWERBOARD TYCHE powering our notebooks and other devices soon!

Encryption Software

Since 2018, we’ve been in contact with CEuniX.eu , who created the Post-Quantum-Cryptography library. Particularly, we’ve been in touch with Stiepan, a Free Software and PowerPC enthusiast, who is now Chief Executive Officer of the QRCrypto SA. They would love to see PowerPC running their Post-Quantum Encryption software. We want to see it running on our PowerPC Notebook.

In 2018, they made a donation for our Electrical Schematics Donation Campaign and now they want to help us again by supporting the last mile of Donation Campaigns.

We are very grateful for their commitment to our project

Rework of a part of the mobo and situation of the components

We were waiting for the two ordered MXM AMD video cards, but the distributor informed us that they were forcefully EOF ( End of Life) due to the end of GDDR5 production. Moreover, the merge of AMD and Xinlinx is delaying the production of the new video card with GDDR6.

As you know, we were having troubles to find a few components in the marked (listed below) not only because of their availability but also due to the increased price. After an extensive research, the designer was able to identify the replacement components.

Below, a detailed list of unavailable or extremly expensive parts that the designer is replacing with other readily-available components:

  • 1 per pcb Transistor: NPN; BSR17A bipolar; 40V; 0.2A; 0.35W; SOT23 – ON SEMICONDUCTOR > 3100% cost increase from 0,5 euro to 16,50 euro per piece
  • 4 per pcb Field Effect Transistor –NDC7002N MOSFET 2N-CH 50V 0.51A SSOT6 – ON SEMICONDUCTOR : >1100% cost increase from 0,50 euro to 6,5 euro per piece
  • 2 per pcb MOSFET N-CH 100V 60A PPAK SO-8 SiR870DP – Vishay Siliconix > 3250% cost increase from 1,53 euro to 50 Euro per piece
  • 1 per pcb Parallel NOR Flash Automotive Memory MT28EW01GABA1HJS-0AAT – MICRON > 3250% cost increase from 13 euro to 423 euro!!!
  • 1 per pcb IC EEPROM 256KBIT I2C 1MHZ 8SOIC AT24C256C-SSHL-B – Microchip Technology > 1000% cost increase from 0,29 euro to 2,5 euro
  • 1 per pcb 24-bit translating 1.65- to 5.5-V I2C/SMBus I/O expander TCA6424ARGJR – Texas Instruments Not Available
  • 1 per pcb 24 MHz XO (Standard) LVCMOS Oscillator ASFLMB-24.000MHZ-LC-T – Abracon LLC – Not Available
  • 1 per pcb I/O Controller Interface IC HI-PERFORM LW PWR SM FOOT USB 2.0 HUB USB2514-AEZC – Not Available
  • 1 per pcb Two-Lane PCIe 2.0 to Four-Port 6 Gbps SATA I/O Controller 88SE9235 – MARVELL – 980 euro!!!!!!!
  • 1 per pcb 6-port, 12-lane, PCIe 2.0 Packet Switch PI7C9X2G612GP – Diodes – 700 euro!!!!
  • 1 per pcb Power Switch ICs FDC6331L – onsemi / Fairchild – >3300% cost increase from 1,25 to 41,6 euro
  • 1 per pcb Switching Voltage Regulators 4.5-18V 20A SWIFT TPS544B20RVFT – Texas Instruments – 90 Euro!!!
  • 6 per pcb Switching Voltage Regulators 4.5-V to 28-V, 6-A TPS56637RPAR – Texas Instruments – > 10000% cost increase from 3 euro to 344 euro per piece ( 6 piece = 2.064 euro!!!)

Previously missing in February, but now available again

  • 3 per pcb IRLML6346TRPBF – N-Channel 30 V 3.4A (Ta) 1.3W (Ta) – Infineon Technologies
  • 2 per pcb 403C11A24M00000 24 MHz ±10ppm Crystal 10pF 60 Ohms 4-SMD
  • 7 per pcb MOSFET – DMN3730U-7 N 750mA 30V POWER MOS – Diodes
  • 9 per pcb Trans MOSFET – SI4925DY P-CH 30V 5.3A 8-Pin SOIC – ON SEMICONDUCTOR

The designer is replacing these components with new ones available currently and having an affordable cost in the market. Consequently, there’s extensive rework of the electrical schematics and of the Printed Circuit Board design. The new PCB design should be ready in June 2022. In the meantime, the designer is ordering the new components. When we receive them, we should have everything needed to produce prototypes.

Our speech on LibrePlanet 2022

In March 2022, we attended the LibrePlanet 2022 and followed many interesting talks.

LibrePlanet 2022: “Living Liberation” was a resounding success. Participants socialized using our online conference space, LibreAdventure, and created beautiful things in Minetest. Stalwart and Supporter level attendees joined the LibrePlanet after-party with staff and board members, which was a blast. Both Saturday and Sunday featured a wide range of speakers covering how nearly every topic you can think of relates to one common concept: free software.

Our talk was titled “Why we feel it is a liberation experience to take part to the Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook project,” and was presented at the LibrePlanet 2022 by Roberto Innocenti.

This talk illustrate the reasons and motivations that made Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook undertake the challenge of designing a PowerPC based notebook from scratch — one that is fully compliant with the Open Hardware principles and based on GNU/Linux — and what we are learning from it.

Pre-certification and CE certification Campaign Launched

Posted on by Communications Team

Thanks to our supporters we did it again!

Thanks to another significant donation made by Wiktor Glowack, the previous donation campaign to finance the Hardware Test reached its goal on the 27th of January.
Thank you very much, Wiktor!
We are very happy to have found such a generous contributor, his support will benefit the entire PowerPC and open computing community.
We will strive to do anything required to achieve the final goal: providing the community with the most powerful, fully Open Source, and production-ready PowerPC laptop motherboard.

As soon as the prototypes are ready, we will transfer the money collected from the campaign targeting the Hardware Tests to ACube Systems, the company we selected in this challenging journey to make a PowerPC notebook.

At the moment, we are on hold on the production of the three prototypes because of still missing electronic components. This is most unexpected as we thought we would be ready by now. However, we still have the plan to carry out the hardware tests immediately after production, and right after that, we will publish an updated version of the motherboard schematics on our GitLab repository.

The campaign we launch today has the goal to finance the pre-certification and CE certification, a compulsory requirement for any electronic product being sold within the European Economic Area. The CE marking means that the manufacturer or importer affirms the good’s conformity with European health, safety, and environmental protection standards (see Wikipedia).

The financial target of this new campaign is 12500 euros (around 14128 USD).

VICE v3.60, the C64 emulator, is available for PowerPC 64bit Big Endian

Thanks to our fellow member Roberto Guardato any user of the Debian Linux PowerPC 64 bit Big Endian may play Commodore 64 games using the recently released version 3.60 of the VICE emulator.

This is line with our commitment to maintain an updated version of VICE available for PPC64 BE from our repository at https://repo.powerprogress.org/

A screenshot of VICE running on a MacPro G6 under Debian Linux PPC64 Big Endian.

December 2021 updates – facing electronic components shortages

Posted on by Communications Team
Image by Dmitry Abramov from Pixabay

At the beginning of December 2021 we received an update about the required electronic components that are still missing. We have a total number of 22 missing components, and some of them are present on the board multiple times such as the MOSFET (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET).

Below a detailed list of the missing components in more pieces:

7 per pcb MOSFET – DMN3730U-7 N 750mA 30V POWER MOS – Diodes

9 per pcb Trans MOSFET – SI4925DY P-CH 30V 5.3A 8-Pin SOIC – ON SEMICONDUCTOR

4 per pcb Field Effect Transistor –NDC7002N MOSFET 2N-CH 50V 0.51A SSOT6 – ON SEMICONDUCTOR

3 per pcb IRLML6346TRPBF – N-Channel 30 V 3.4A (Ta) 1.3W (Ta) – Infineon Technologies

2 per pcb 403C11A24M00000 24 MHz ±10ppm Crystal 10pF 60 Ohms 4-SMD

We have in the missed components even few bigger chip in the list from the more expensive and complex 

  1. Marvell 88SE9235 Sata3 controller (Two-Lane PCIe 2.0 to Four-Port 6 Gbps SATA I/O Controller)
  2. Lattice LCMXO256C-5TN100C FPGA – series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) LUTS 78 I/O
  3. MICROCHIP  USB2514B-AEZC I/O Controller Interface IC HI-PERFORM LW PWR SM FOOT USB 2.0 HUB
  4. NXP Semiconductors  PCAL6524HEAZ    Interface – I/O Expanders PCAL6524HE

The other missed components:

MPN REFERENCE
BAS70LT1G D8
B340B-13-F D12
MBR140SFT1G D15
DM3AT-SF-PEJM5(40) J2
DF13E-40DP-1.25V(51) J20
SLC1175-271MEB L58
BSR17A Q9
S25FL256SAGMFI000 U9
AT24C256C-SSHL-B U30
FDC6331L U54
TPS544C20RVFT U65
LTC4368CDD-1#PBF U81

While ACube Systems is looking for 22 missing components contacting various distributors, we at the Power Progress Community, are trying to help searching these components. The main problem we are facing is not finding each component, the problem is the estimated delivery we are facing that most times is six month or more. For this reason we are evaluating to replace some of the components in order to get a more reasonable delivery time. In case you want to help out carrying out this task, you can the effort and conatct us.

QEMU at full speed with KVM on the NXP T2080 CPU

Thanks to Fabiano Rosas, Cédric Le Goater and Zoltan Balaton (see discussion at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/2021-12/msg00231.html) it is now possible to launch virtual machines at nearly native speed with QEMU on our NXP T2080RDB development kit, that mount exactly the same CPU as in our laptop.

This great achievement is possible thanks to the support of KVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine) that allows the virtual machine to directly use the CPU without the need to spend time emulating it.

KVM support for PowerPC Book3e e6500 CPUs will be first introduced starting with the linux kernel 5.16+ and with the next version of QEMU, most probably v7.0. If you want to try it now, you should get the release candidate of the kernel 5.16 and compile QEMU yourself from the GIT master branch

We successfully compiled the upcoming kernel and QEMU and then tested some virtual machines running Linux for PowerPC 64 bit in Big Endian mode. Below you can see a screenshot of QEMU running three virtual machines with KVM activated. The host system is our NXP T2080RDB devkit that runs Debian SID PPC64, then there is a VM with Debian SID PPC64 (bottom-right), then OpenSUSE Tumbleweed PPC64 (bottom-left), and finally VOID Linux PPC64 (top-right).

Please note that the KVM support to the e6500 PowerPC family is still in progress, so it may need some tweaking before it may be considered reliable.

Video of our last talks – October and November 2021

Open Power Summit 2021 NA

Prepare yourself to switch computing to Open Hardware Power Architecture

https://cfp.openpower.foundation/summit2021/talk/F9DKAK/

Open Hardware through Open Power SBC

https://cfp.openpower.foundation/summit2021/talk/PAS3TZ/

Sfscon.it

PPC64 Open Hardware Notebook prototype around the corner

PPC64 Open Hardware Notebook prototype around the corner

An NXP T1040 Based Single Board Computer

LinuxDay Online 2021 – Italy

Quando la comunità produce un portatile Open Hardware

https://www.linuxday.it/2021/programma/talk.php?slug=quando-la-comunita-produce-un-portatile-open-hardware

SBC Open Power / Open Hardware

Hardware Test Campaign Started – Let’s join the group

Posted on by Communications Team

Thanks to our supporters we did it again!

The donation campaign for financing three prototypes reached its goal on Sunday the 24th of October  with a surprising final rush thanks to the biggest donation ever received that made us jump on our chairs when we saw it. Thank you all, and especially many thanks to Wiktor Glowacki!!

We transferred the money collected with the campaign to ACube Systems, the company we selected in this challenging journey for making a PowerPC notebook. At the moment we are facing some delays due to the electronics industry supply-chain difficulties (see our post about it), and ACube is currently waiting on the last few electronic components in order to finally build the three boards.

We are now ready to launch the next donation campaign for financing the Hardware Tests with a target  of 14000 euros.

The new campaign starts today, and the donations will be transferred to it. Our hope is to conclude this new campaign less than 10 months, but it will largely depend on your support.

Right after testing the three prototypes, we will publish an updated version of the electronic schematics on our GitLab repository so that the publicly available design will be an extensively checked version.

We are relatively confident that the donations will speed up once we will be able to publicly show the physical prototypes, as that should help people to believe more and more in the project.

We remind you that after this new campaign meant to perform the necessary hardware tests, the next campaign is for the CE hardware certification with a target of 12500 euros, and then we are finally done: ready for mass production!

 

A group of experts to configure U-Boot

The new donation campaign will support the work carried out by ACube Systems together with its hardware designer for the Hardware Tests.

On our side, we will strive to contribute to the development process by working on the U-Boot bootloader. This task is quite urgent, and we are currently setting up a core group of volunteers with some U-Boot knowledge and device trees required to initialize the hardware.

As stated in a post published in 2018, we have had some experience configuring U-Boot when we set up  our Development Kit, the NXP T2080-RDB. Our configuration was based on the legacy U-Boot version originally provided with the Development Kit (QorIQ SDK v2.0-1703).

An example of the problems we are facing is that our current build of U-Boot does not initialize the video card, so the only way to interact with U-Boot is via a remote serial terminal. This problem must be solved to improve the overall usability of the motherboard.

You may have a look at the steps we followed while tweaking with U-Boot on our wiki, and on the comprehensive and detailed documentation from our association website. 

Below you may find a  commit made in 2018 to the original U-Boot that was built back in 2017 that was provided with the NXP SDK v2.0-1703

https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-notebook/freescale.com-ppc-u-boot/-/commits/master/

The plan is to start working on the latest U-Boot release (2021-10), we are in doubt whether to start from the U-Boot official mainline repository or, alternatively, from the U-Boot QorIQ repository. Any advice about what is the best choice is mostly welcome (please, add a comment to this post).

Below you may find a link to what we worked on back in 2018 in order to boot Linux on the NXP Development Kit T2080-RDB

https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-notebook/T2080customizations

 

A group of experts for building the kernel

Anyone willing to help in this area should test any new release of the Linux kernel to identify any changes that may prevent the use of an NXP T2080 CPU based platform such as our notebook motherboard.

Unfortunately these tasks require a direct use of a hardware mounting the very same CPU used in the notebook motherboard and we are unable to provide access to our NXP T2080RDB to anyone. While we wait for the prototypes to become available there is little we can do in this area, but nevertheless, if you are interested helping out here you may start investigating the differences between the Book3e and Book3s PowerPC families, keeping in mind the T2080 belongs to the Book3e family, and specifically to the NXP e6500 variant. The main Linux kernel developers mailing list is https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/ 

At the moment we successfully tested and used kernels up to 5.12.x on our NXP DevKit T2080RDB, but we are unable to run later kernels starting with version 5.13.x, the kernel simply refuse to load. The cause is currently under investigation.
If you are willing to help us here, please contact us and we will try to grant you access to the T2080RDB.

This is the GitLab page where we keep track of the kernels tested on the DevKit

 

Work required to fix KVM for e6500 cores

By O.T.S.U. – http://openvirtualizationalliance.org/downloads/kvm-logo_300dpi.png,
CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24109871

A different area but closely linked to the kernel, is the support to the KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine that does not currently work in our tests with the T2080RDB. This is a must-have feature as it allows the user to manage virtual machines running at nearly native speed because they do not need to emulate the CPU because KVM is able to use the host computer CPU directly.

Screenshot taken by Christian Zigotzky on his AmigaOne X5000 (CPU NXP P5040, PPC64, Book3e, e5500) with a working QEMU+KVM.

We are quite confident that with a relatively small effort it could work because there are people using KVM on a very similar CPU, the NXP P5020, which is a Book3e CPU, specifically the e5500 variant, the previous generation NXP CPU. You may have a look below at the results achieved by Christian Zigotzky on his AmigaOne X5000, a computer currently being sold by A-Eon and based on the NXP P5020 or P5040.

These are the relevant mailing list about respectively QEMU and KVM on PowerPC:

A group of experts on endianness issues

Another important task that we plan to carry out while the prototypes are being made available, is to coordinate people that are able to identify and fix issues preventing Linux distributions for PPC64 (Big Endian or simply BE) such as Debian, VOID or MintPPC from working on the motherboard. Other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu (last supported version 14.04) or Fedora (last supported version 28) abandoned the PPC64 a long time ago, it would be great to have them supported again, but that is way too ambitious at the moment.

The plan is to identify which software has problems on our NXP T2080 CPU, most probably due to endianness issues, identify the required set of changes in the source code, and then submit a patch to the maintainers of the software. The problem we are facing here is that the vast majority of modern software is meant to work on Little Endian CPUs only and most of the time developers do not test their software on any Big Endian platform, also because they are becoming a quite rare piece of hardware nowadays.

As having access to one T2080RDB only could be a problem, we can say that in our experience the NXP T2080 CPU behaves quite similarly to the G5 CPU (PowerPC 970), the last commercially available 64 bit CPU with Altivec used by Apple on their line of PowerPC based Macs. If a software works well on the G5 there is a very good chance that it will work well on the T2080 too. Sure, the T2080 is quite less power hungry with respect to the G5, but the G5 would be the perfect companion for carrying out the investigation while our notebook motherboard becomes available to purchase. Another difference with respect to the G5 CPU to keep in mind, is that the T2080 belongs to the Book3e CPU family where the “e” stands for “embedded”, whereas the G5 is a Book3s (aka sPAPR) CPU, see this page for an schematic explanation of the PowerPC families (https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/powerpc/cpu_families.txt). A more detailed explanation of the characterics of the Book3e CPU family is available here https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/user-guide/BOOK_EUM.pdf

We would suggest to anyone interest in helping on the job to get their hand on a PowerMac G5 possibly mounting any RadeonHD video board, and install the PPC64 big endian version of Debian (https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/current/).

An additional expertise we are looking for is anyone with some knowledge on how to tweak software in order to enable Altivec support, a single-precision floating point and integer SIMD instruction set that would greatly improve the user experience when supported. 

In the past few years we identified quite a few key software areas potentially affected by endianness issues that may heavily impact the everyday use of the platform, but three areas are in our opinion the most relevant ones.

  • Anything related to driving modern AMD Radeon GPUs. We selected AMD GPUs to use in conjunction with the  notebook motherboard, as overall these cards seem to behave quite well when used in a big endian environment. The problem to face here is that any update on anything related to driving these video cards may cause errors preventing any video output, for example updates on the kernel, on X11, Mesa for 3D software, and more recently Wayland or Vulkan. As an example, a recent update of Debian SID for PPC64 suddently broke something and now we cannot start any X11 session on any RadeonHD we tried, the cause is under investigation.
  • Video hardware acceleration is also a target that must be investigated, so we would need someone able to deal with problems related to AMD Radeon specific technologies such as Unified Video Decoder (UVD), Video Code Engine (VCE) and Video Core Next (VCN). Software using these technologies that must be carefully investigated are VLC, mplayer, and the video decoding part of web browsers in order to let them play videos at full speed because the CPU is not powerful enough to decode FullHD or 4K video streams.