Winter was an hibernation period for what it concerns issues preventing the booting of our Powerboard Tyche. A number of unfortunate contributing factors caused our paid engineers to be unable to work for us. Notice that they are paid for a fraction of a full-time engineer but, they are passionate about the common goal and they are working during week-ends and their spare time. Personal reasons did not put them in a position to works during winter on u-boot . On the positive side, we had more time to receive donations to cover their work. In fact, up to now we were using funds collected to pay for the CE certification for our two paid collaborators, but thanks to the new fundings coming from your donations, we have now a more or less balanced budget.
We particularly thank to all recurring donors that keep a constant contribution allowing us to keep the project ongoing.
We discovered that our online donation system did not work properly, and some of you kindly warned us. We were totally unaware that such a problem existed, and we were unable to track down when it first appeared. The problem preventing users to enter the amount of money they want to donate is now solved, so please, if any of you tried in the past, please, you may now proceed contributing to the project. Do not hesitate contacting us if you face any problems.
U-Boot development
The cost faced up to now for developing U-Boot for a better support of the T2080 CPU, reached around 3000 euros, while the cost for the jtag hardware debugger was around 700 euros. On the other side, donations for the current campaign reached 3600 euros. So, to keep up with upcoming costs for developing U-Boot further, the hardware debugging process, and the required board electronic design changes, some additional funding is required.
https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-notebook/u-boot/-/merge_requests/1
Struggling to identify what prevent the board from booting
The hardware engineer that designed and made the PowerBoard Tyche prototypes for us was busy during the entire winter season, as he was working in other PowerPC related hardware project for A-Cube (see A-EON A1222). Starting from April 2024, the work on our prototypes will restart. This work will focus on identifying and solving the problems preventing the board from booting.
As you may know, our not-for-profit association is made of volunteer hobbyists, and like you, we are all looking forward to put our hands on a working PowerPC notebook. No one (donors and volunteers collaborators), have a big amount of funds to allocate to face the problems that are arising along this project. As a consequence, we have quite a limited capacity for action. As an example, we cannot afford full-time professionals working 100% of their time on solving issues. We should go with the availability of professionals that shares our goal and are willing to dedicate some of their time and settle for a quite a modest salary.
We are exhausted by the constant delays we are facing, delays that we could not foresee, and neither we are able to eradicate. Just image how we feel having the physical prototypes in our hands since December 2022, and being unable to even booting them up. We are so grateful to Max Tretene from ACube-Systems that last autumn tried everything possible from the firmware point-of-view to boot the board. Unfortunately, neither Max nor us were able to extract anything meaningful from the messages coming out of the serial port appearing in the JTAG debugger when trying to boot the board, messages that we never encountered in any tests we performed on the T2080 Developer kit from NXP. As all other paid collaborators have performed all conceivable tests to solve the boot problem, together with ACube Systems we decided to ask the original engineer that designed and made these boards to identify and solve the issue we are facing. We really hope that a solution will be found as soon as possible.
Another NXP T2080RDB devkit for developing U-Boot
Thanks to the kind contribution of NXP, we are able to provide Bas Vermeulen, our Dutch developer working on U-Boot, a NXP T2080RDB devkit. With the direct access to a hardware based on the very same CPU adopted for our PowerPC based notebook, we all hope that Bas will be in a better position to fix problems and extend the support to the T2080 CPU in U-Boot and also provide better support to AMD based video drivers, allowing a graphical output at boot time. To make a more suitable environment setup for Bas, he also fit an AMD RX 550 video card in the devkit, a perfect environment that greatly facilitate his precious work.
You can find the Bas contributions on our GitLab repository at
The ati_radeon_fb driver is no longer present
Configure the device tree to support the correct PCI spaces
Create a driver for the AMD/Radeon GPU
U-Boot 2018-11 recognise Radeon HD and Radeon RX
One of the goal was to make U-Boot recognize modern Radeon video cards. Up to now we were not able to get any video during U-Boot initialisation, and only when the Linux kernel kick in we could obtain an output from the video card.
Thanks to Max Tretene of ACube Systems that worked on U-Boot 2018.11 sources, Radeon HD and Radeon RX are now supported. Unfortunately. More recent versions of U-Boot cause problems while trying to compile and cannot be used at the moment.
To enable the graphics card in U-Boot, Max used the same solution adopted for other motherboard produced by ACube Systems such as the Sam440 or the Sam460. The solution adopt a BIOS emulator driver, which emulates, via x86 instructions, VESA calls necessary to initialise the video card via its BIOS. The code used by Max is quite old, most probably created at the time of the release of the first AmigaOne cards on the PowerPC G3 and G4 processors.
Some changes to the PCIe bus settings were necessary as well in the U-Boot sources, because in the configuration of the T2080RDB included in U-Boot there is no video output at all.
New MXM video cards
While trying to solve the problems preventing the notebook motherboard from booting, we were looking for new and affordable MXM video cards, as in the past their availability on the market was quite limited and quite costly. We luckily found a new MXM video cards supplier in Hong Kong, but ordering them from Italy proved to be both quite a long and quite an expensive journey because of very high extra-European bank transactions fees and importation taxes. Nevertheless, these are quite cheaper MXM cards, compared to the previous ones we found last year, and in addition these new cards have higher specs, and are based on the AMD RX550 chips with 4 GB of GDDR5.
We plan to test these new MXM cards as soon as the notebook motherboard will boot properly, and if confirmed to work, these new MXM boards will allow ACube Systems to lower the cost quite a bit for the mass production of the notebook.
Each of these new MXM card is sold for 90 euros, we bought two of them, so 180 euros, plus 32 euros for the bank transaction, and another 32 euros for the extra-European importation taxes, for a total amount of 244 euros. For comparison, last year we spent a total amount of 950 euros for two MXM cards with lower specs.
Changes to the Powerboard Tyche PCB design
As we have already stated in our last post, some changes in the mechanical design is needed to better accommodate the motherboard in the Slimbook Eclipse chassis. As we really would like to avoid further issues of this kind, we are going to perform an high resolution 3D scan of the chassis to be able to precisely simulate the volumetric design of the motherboard.
In addition, we plan an upgrade to the PCB design in order to apply changes to the original electronic design, to reduce the final production cost. So far, we come up with three changes: 1) removal of the costly Sata3 Marvell controller, 2) removal of the SIM card slot, and 3) removal of the second NAND rom. In particular, leaving out the Sata3 controller was initially criticized by some of the contributing volunteers, but we demonstrated that existing M.2 connectors could easily replace its functionality using cheap M.2 to Sata3 adapters.
Powerboard Tyche Notebook Chassis
We are waiting an answer from Slimbook regarding the availability of their Eclipse Notebook Chassis. Already a year has passed since the last time we checked, and we are worried because four years has passed since we first identified this solution, and even more years has passed since these chassis became available on the market.
At the same time, we are looking for potential alternative options for another notebook chassis. However, as notebook with MXM cards require extra internal space and appropriate cooling systems, finding a suitable solution is difficult.
We were in contact with Framework as we are currently investigating whether their quite modular chassis is suitable for our motherboard. Unfortunately, it seems that because of the MXM card would cause the need for a major rework of the chassis, particularly regarding the custom Expansion Bay Module.
Call for 2024 membership
Currently, PowerProgressCommunity, our not-for-profit association responsible for running the notebook project, consists of around twenty members that pay the annual fee of 30 euros. In addition, there are recurrent donors, which are another twenty (being five of them members of the association)
Paying 30 euros to become a member of the association allows you to take part in the decisions made about the PowerPC notebook project, by participating in our internal discussions. Collected funds are used to support the expenses required for the various websites we run on commercial hosting companies and to pay for the donation platform, a commercial product we use for managing the funds, at the moment for the PowerPC project only.
Our association focus in supporting alternative technologies as a way to guarantee the freedom of choice, allowing anyone to opt for solutions that are not mainstream, even at the cost of minor downsides. The more we are, the more viable these alternatives becomes.
Joining the association is a win win situation if you like to be protagonist in our projects because its a coherent and happy move. With your membership to the PPC association, we could be more intelligent and strong to face our goal. The Association mission is not limited to this project but is open to other projects that aim passion for Free Software and Hardware and “Knowledge in solidarity and in the service of liberation from conditions of constraint and oppression and for freedom of choice.”, “Creating social conditions of equal opportunities.” and other goals.
Call for a Scientific & Technical Committee
We are setting up in our not-for-profit association a Scientific & Technical Committee that, for example, will provide solutions for our Open Hardware project, examine other Open Hardware projects, adopt other OpenISA CPU, and develop additional Open Hardware Notebook design. Anyone of the associated member of the PowerProgressCommunity will be able to join this committee.
By establishing this committee, we intend to make our association and our PPC Community a suitable place allowing the personal and social development, sharing the motto “Knowledge in solidarity and to be in service of liberation from conditions of constraint and oppression and for freedom of choice”.
Changes in the association statute
In Italy, anyone can decide to allocate 5 per thousands of the paid national tax in favor of not-for-profit associations conforming to certain administrative standards.
We started the administrative procedure to update the statute of our not-for-profit association required to conform to the required standard that will enable us to receive this kind of contributions. Thanks to this formal change, anyone in Italy will be able to select PowerProgressCommunity as the target association for donating a small percentage of their tax, a huge opportunity to raise easily more funding, at the cost of a slightly more complex internal administration.
Call for developers
We ask any capable developer to increase the number of software supporting PowerPC 64 bit platform (aka PPC64) as the target architecture. In particular, we welcome anyone willing to introduce support for the big-endian variant of the PPC64 architecture, the only one supported by the NXP T2080 CPU that we selected for out PowerPC notebook.
We are currently revising our GitLab based repositories that we setup during the last years while trying to add support to the PPC64 platform. We invite existing and new collaborators to identify potential libraries and GNU/Linux applications to which they are willing to work on, even adding support to a small piece of software may allow bigger application to start working on PPC64 architecture, do not underestimate what even a small contribution may achieve in a bigger picture.
More software working on PPC64, means a better chance for our Powerboard Tyche notebook to become a useful piece of hardware for a bigger number of people, making it an appealing alternative for a broader community.
In case you want to help out on any kind of software stack, please contact us or fill our collaboration survey. In case you are already a contributing volunteer to any existing open source software development, adding support for the big endian PPC64 platform is more than welcome.
If you do not have direct access to a physical PPC64 hardware platform, we can provide you access to our IBM Power9 based environment that is kindly provided by OSU Open Source Lab that we thanks so much for their support.
