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rogual

Do you know if there's one of these boards on the market that has:

1. A GPU

2. No binary blobs, no reverse engineering?

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I believe the answer is no.

You might be interested in monitoring this list of what gets closest: https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

Also, the Novena mainboard has a chance of getting there, if you look at this page: https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page and then note that the Vivante GPU is close to having free drivers: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Etnaviv-...

Intel GPUs require neither a blob nor reverse engineering, so ironically the Minnowboard (http://wiki.minnowboard.org/MinnowBoard_Wiki_Home; current revision is "Minnowboard Turbot") is very open (also the UEFI implementation (TianaCore) is open source; just a small FSP (Firmware Support Package) by Intel containing binary data has to be compiled in - as far as I know it contains no suspicious data; start at https://firmware.intel.com/projects/minnowboard-max if you want to read about the details). I am rather sure this processor/board has no support for the dreaded Intel AMT.

If you want an ARM board: The "Sabre Lite - i.MX6 Quad Core" board is the nearest to this ideal that I know of. Traditionally Freescale has been very open with the specifications (though after NXP bought them this changed to worse). The GPU (Vivante™ GC2000) is not strictly in the category "No binary blobs, no reverse engineering", but I have read that this is among the GPUs found on ARM boards by far the most easy one to reverse engineer, thus there seems to exist a decent reverse-engineered driver:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Free_and_open-sou...

(EDIT: For the situation for open Vivante drivers also see https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Etnaviv-... (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743550)).

Looks like this Minnowboard is costly... looks like it cost about 200 dollars. :-/

According to the two shop links on http://wiki.minnowboard.org/Where_to_buy the Minnowboard Turbot costs $139.95 (Netgate) or $150.00 (Mouser).

The SABRE Lite i.MX 6Quad has a similar price: On

> http://uk.farnell.com/nxp/mcimx6q-sl/i-mx6-quad-sabre-lite-d...

it costs £114.29 (about $140), on Mouser it is even $189.95.

I think the Jetson TK1 from NVIDIA can run mainline Linux with most of the devices working.

I actually have one of those, but never investigated the bootloader situation for that platform.

And to get good use out of the GPU (one of the main selling points for this platform), you'll want to use the Nvidia proprietary driver.

The K1 chip has a blob-free boot (unlike the newer chips AFAIK) except for the USB-based flash programming / recovery mode, so for the initial installation you'd need to manually flash the eMMC somehow if you don't want to run any proprietary code.

And yes, CUDA isn't supported by the open drivers. Other than that, I've heard Nouveau works relatively well. Though I'm not still sure if the open source graphics community has figured out a way to get stacks like Xorg or Wayland/Weston running without hacking the source on architectures where rendering and scanout are done by different DRM devices.

NVIDIA has made it possible to run the Jetson TK1 under Nouveau with hardware accelerated graphics (Weston/Wayland or X).

https://github.com/NVIDIA/tegra-nouveau-rootfs

Using a completely open stack on the TK1, from u-boot to kernel (except for the USB firmware), I can run ARM virtual machines with QEMU/KVM.

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