Pinebook ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 CPU | Hacker News Reader

Pinebook ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 CPU

cnx-software.com

175 pointsawqrre90 comments

It's nice to get a laptop form-factor with a 720p screen for less than $100, but it's worth noting that the specs are on-par with a 2-year old smartphone flagship. Given Allwinner's history of GPL skirmishes and backdooring, I'm also not too happy to see their CPU in this machine.

> specs are on-par with a 2-year old smartphone flagship

Cortex-A53 is a low cost, energy efficient, slow, in-order implementation. I don't think it was ever used as the main core in a flagship smartphone. Something like a 2012 ODROID-X2 SBC with its Cortex-A9 cores should have no trouble outperforming it, but it doesn't support AArch64.

> Given Allwinner's history of GPL skirmishes and backdooring

On the other hand, the linux-sunxi community does a pretty good job of bringing mainline support for Allwinner SocS and they're working on the A64. That's probably the longer term plan for the creators of this laptop.

The Cortex-A53 is also used in the Orange Pi 2, a Raspberry Pi 3 alternative for $20. On paper this is some nice bang for the buck hardware, just the implementation is sub par.

This must be based on the NexDock: http://nexdock.com/

The pictures of the laptop are exactly the same device I have sitting in my lap right now. The NexDock of course has no computer inside it: it's a keyboard, touchpad, SD reader, USB hub, and display.

What device do you attach to it?

Simply scroll down and:

"How Does It Work? NexDock is a laptop that runs on your smartphone, tablet or mini PC. Use NexDock with the latest Windows 10 mobile devices (such as the Lumia 950) and take advantage of the new Continuum feature, which allows smartphones and tablets to switch between touch and desktop modes. iPhone and Android users can utilize of the mini HDMI port or wireless adapter for a substantial screen size and productivity upgrad

I was asking him specifically what he attaches to it for his work.

There are still a few places selling the Motorola Atrix lapdock. I got a brand new (old stock) one for 50€!

PineBook is cheaper than Nexdock though.

Looks pretty interesting and my initial excitement for this soon dulled when I thought that if I'm taking this device somewhere I might as well just take my laptop.

Still, it looks like a very cool gadget. What's the battery life like on it?

There are places I'd take something like this but not my laptop. A CTF competition at a security convention, for example. I've already got a burner laptop that gets wiped every time I use it just for this purpose.

Anyone know how does nexdock compare with Andromium? I definitely want this type of product, but I don't know enough to make a decision on which one to back.... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

i guess if you would make the battery smaller you could fit a raspberry pi inside it, and perhaps thats exactly what they've done..

No, it doesn't have to be based on nexdock. They probably both use the same cheap generic shell mass produced by some Chinese factory.

That's useful. I've been buying old Asus EeePC machines on eBay for small projects. Unlike a Raspberry Pi, you get a keyboard, screen, case, and power supply, all for under $50. But the supply of old subnotebooks can't hold out forever.

What sorts of small projects?

I increased the RAM of my EEEPC 901 to 2 GB years ago (2009-2012?) and I used it to develop Rails applications on trains and during a vacation. Not as fast and comfortable as my Core 2 Duo laptop at that time, but it worked. By the way, it still works even if I don't turn it on often nowadays.

I would do this but I have little to no faith in ebay sellers. I usually buy off old electronics from people I know in person.

Remember, this company is known for flouting all of the GPL, and providing extremely out of date drivers. And they also refuse to submit back into main any of the hardware changes they make.

Whatever condition you buy it in now will be the condition it will be in 10 years. Expect absolutely no upgrades of the kernel subsystem.

The sorry state of open source on ARM is not due to the vendors but ARM itself and to an extent Google. The effort to open GPU drivers on ARM is over 5 years old now I think and you can see all the promises made on the ARM community forums.

The blame is shifted from the vendor to ARM and then back like a football and open source developers give up and look for something productive to do.

It appears Arm is not interested in open source or moving beyond the mobile market where things are tightly controlled.

Can you explain further how Google is possibly at fault here? Legitimately ignorant of the situation.

Google is currently developing an alternate kernel which will be MIT licensed. They've been removing GPL from userspace as fast as they can, and now it seems they want to remove it from the whole system.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12480566/google-fuchsia-ne...

https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta/blob/master/LICENS...

I doubt that the primary motivation for Magenta is to eliminate the GPL'd Linux kernel from Android. A much more practical way to do that would be to use one of the BSDs.

They also deprecated GCC from the NDK, going forward only clang will be supported.

GCC is still around, because just like it happened with Apple, there are a few features that clang still lacks in order to fully replace it in the context of Android.

Brillo has even less GPL components than Android.

Out of curiosity, will this end custom ROMs?

Not necessarily, but it will be harder work reverse-engineering what OEMs do without the modified kernel source releases

I don't think you can legitimately say that Google are hampering open source by releasing more open source software. You might argue that they're stepping back from the GPL, but that's different.

I bet in around 10 years time, the GPL will be surely missed, but then it will be too late.

+1 Even today Android is falsely advertised as open source while in fact you can't install the OSS version on any phone and expect it to work without proprietary blobs. Thank closed device drivers for that, and more restrictions will come in the future.

Right now the OSS community should focus their efforts on the most important goal: having fully open source hardware CPUs and peripherals. We already have huge loads of open source software but we still lack a comparatively open iron to run them on.

Well, RISC-V is coming and some of that will be fully open source, freely licensed hardware. For example: http://www.lowrisc.org/

Peripherals are a lot more tricky. RISC-V is concentrating on the CPU cores, cache hierarchy and interrupt controller. Peripherals will be proprietary for a while, but could be open source one day.

The entire ARM ecosystem is basically Google and ARM. Google is using open source Linux to power Android but all the hardware drivers are closed. The only reason you cannot simply install and use Linux on any Android device is the closed source drivers.

Yet these drivers exists and work perfectly for Android which is the Linux kernel, so why are they not being made available after all these years?

If there was any interest in open source by Arm or Google they would make some minimum intiatives to makes the drivers available but not a single initiative exists.

There have been multiple discussion on Ars and HN itself about Google's relations with Android and open source..

[1]http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

What does Google have anything to do with this? If there are companies to blame for the sorry state of open source on ARM, that would be Qualcomm, Broadcom, and other SoC makers.

That might be the entire mobile ecosystem (although that sounds too simplistic, still, you are forgetting Linaro), but the ARM ecosystem also includes M-profile (deep embedded), R-profile (RTOS) and server-class (SBSA and "almost" designs like Octeon-TX and Tegra X1). The ARM server ecosystem is most definitely a bunch of software and hardware players, and Google is not a significant presence there FWIW.

It's annoying there's no Free driver stack for the Mali GPUs, but pretty much all other ARM IP is supported just fine in mainline Linux. Calling it a 'sorry state of open source on ARM' seems disingenuous.

This is inaccurate. ARM SOCs are all different and tightly closed. Which ARM SOC can you run on Linux without support from third party open source developers?

You need more than just CPU support for it to be usable, and most mainline support is the minimum to make the Android part of it work. Drivers for all the hardware bits are tied tightly to Android. Is there any ARM SOC yet that ARM has said can run Linux out of the box?

Only the rasberry pi works on the latest mainline and that is due to the work done by the foundation and there too the GPU driver is a blob.

Egads... They aren't "tightly closed". Just there's no way to enumerate what devices are on what IO on the chip. - Don't get me wrong, many dealers just don't broadcast what's on a fabless-fab. Doesn't mean they're closed. Go hire someone who speaks and types Mandarin and get the info about "Gongkai".

We were at this place once before, with 16 bit soundcards and ISA, for those of you that remember. In those days, we had to set IRQ and I/O so the device could communicate with the computer. And those devices had to correspond with each other. It was a hot mess, but what we had. MCA tried to fix it, with proprietary crappiness, but PCI actually won out.

In reality, ARM is too open, and has too manhy ways in which hardware can be added. That causes problems, because there's no detection routines - "detection" can crash certain chips.

Enumeration is solved by device tree. The problem really is drivers for important parts of SOCs that make running Linux on them practical.

> Is there any ARM SOC yet that ARM has said can run Linux out of the box?

That is not how this works. ARM doesn't design any SoCs sold to the general public. They design some specifications, such as the ARM architecture specs, a number of implementations (i.e. the Cortex cores) and a number of other IP blocks such as cache controllers, memory controllers, SD/MMC controllers, UART controllers, interconnects, DMA engines, MMUs and, yes, GPUs. AFAIK all of these apart from GPUs are supported in mainline Linux due to drivers written by ARM, which is why I've said that all their IP except GPUs is supported properly.

Now, to actually create SoCs, other companies such as Allwinner, NVIDIA, Samsung, etc, buy a license either for the architecture and use their own implementation (e.g. NVIDIA Denver) or they buy a license for the ARM implementations (e.g. the Allwinner A64 which uses Cortex-A53). These companies can then license a subset of the other ARM IP blocks, they can create their own, or they can license them from other companies. So you end up with SoCs which are either partly or completely not ARM IP, hence not ARM's responsibility to support as a complete unit. If you're looking to blame someone, blame whoever designed the SoC.

> Drivers for all the hardware bits are tied tightly to Android.

The GPU and video accelerators have userspace bits which are typically proprietary and Android specific. This is what I was saying is indeed annoying but not that much of a problem. The GPU on ARM SoCs only provides OpenGL(ES) acceleration, while graphics output, framebuffers, and even the hardware support for XV (video scaling, colorspace conversion) is usually implemented in different IP blocks with available drivers. Software decoding for 1080p and smaller video is fast enough on most SoCs.

> ARM SOCs are all different and tightly closed.

They're all different indeed, but not necessarily tightly closed. You can get the reference manual for a whole bunch of SoCs, including NVIDIA Tegra K1 and X1, the Freescale i.MX series, the TI Sitara series and most Allwinner SoCs (ha). These normally exclude the graphics/video accelerators, but everything else needed to have a usable system is typically included.

> Which ARM SOC can you run on Linux without support from third party open source developers?

Things get really blurry between drivers officially supported by the vendor, drivers mainlined by the employees of these companies in their free time, and drivers written by the vendor but mainlined by the community. AFAIK, at least the Tegra series and the X-Gene based APM SoCs are in the first category.

> Only the rasberry pi works on the latest mainline and that is due to the work done by the foundation

Well, that's simply not true. I personally use a Cubieboard 2 (Allwinner A20), Jetson TK1 (Tegra K1), Acer Chromebook 13 (Tegra K1) and APM X-C1 (APM883208) on mainline. On TK1, even the GPU is supported via nouveau and APM883208 doesn't have one.

Wasn't the mainlining work for RPi mostly done by Eric Anholt, who (surprise!) works for Broadcom, the makers of the SoCs they use?

Here's more details on that (see the section on GPL violations): https://linux-sunxi.org/A64

sure but I have been running a Cubietruck with Fedora 20 with an allwinner A20 for 2 years, hooked up a proper SATA 128gig SSD for 35 bux, and when it comes to IO, it beats my Raspberry Pi 3 4:1 even trying my best with "high speed" sd cards. This thing has been humming along beautifully with nginx, elixir, postgres, the lot, serving web pages all day long.

Are there any other 64 bit ARM laptops out there worth looking at? Maybe with a GSM/LTE module, more RAM, or a better screen?

Well it's not exactly a laptop, but how about a Denver-based tablet with a nice keyboard? https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/nexus-9-ssh-on-the-go/

Some chromebooks have aarch64 ARM CPU, including new Acer Chromebook R13

Oh hrm, yes I didn't think of those. Some even have SIM cards.

The Samsung Chromebook Pro looks pretty promising (RR3399, 4GB DRAM, 2K screen), but it hasn't been officially released yet.

This is getting close, but I don't think my dream machine is on the market yet - I'd really like something dirt-cheap, has has an ARM chipset running Debian/Ubunt and lasts for 15 hours on battery. A modern Tandy 100.

Are there any other machines like this, or are cheap machines like the post as far as it gets? I would have considered the ARM Samsung Chromebook, but it has pretty awful battery life.

I have an Asus Flip Chromebook. It doesn't do 15 hours, merely 10, but it's very light, pretty cheap (I bought mine in the UK for £250, but I've seen it in the US down at about $150), has 4GB RAM and a quad core ARM processor making it plenty fast enough for development, and it's even got a reasonable keyboard.

Minor features: capacitative touchscreen, screen that folds all the way round for use in tablet mode, MicroSD card slot, nice big clicky touchpad, completely silent, and a metal case.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/asus-chromebook-c201-review

I run ChromeOS on mine, with Debian in a chroot using Crouton; but I gather you can run Debian on it natively, although with some blobs:

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/C201

I have an Acer R11, which is similar. Crouton is a great project.

Given the price and performance of current generation Chromebooks, I don't see much advantage in going for ARM systems right now.

The Flip is an ARM system!

Yes. What I mean is that the power consumption is a little better, but the current generation Intel Celerons have quite low power consumption too.

One nice thing about x86-64 is that you can also run closed-source apps like games. For example, after having installed Crouton, I was able to install Steam and play some of the Linux games in my library.

Acer Chromebook R13 seems pretty nice, 13.3", glossy full HD screen, 12-hour battery, I think it runs android apps. (350$ in Amazon right now)

I'm waiting for the previously announced, but now delayed Samsung Chromebook Pro. It's thinner, has a higher-rez screen, and has the pen-technology of the 'note' tablets. (rumored 500$)

What I would really like to see is a Tegra X1 based laptop with a nice IPS screen, preferably something matte.

> Tegra X1

GPU I suppose is nice, but how does this Denver thing actually stack up against other ARMs?

I think you're thinking K1. K1 had Denver. X1 has 4x A57.

http://www.nvidia.ca/object/tegra-x1-processor.html

Oops, yes, I confused X1 with this Denver variant of K1 (there was a quad Cortex K1 too).

There's ongoing development of Pyra Handheld PC: http://pyra-handheld.com/ . Not dirt cheap, though.

This is going to be exactly $89 worth of computer.

More for people who never leave terminal or for teaching kids linux.

even if you live in a terminal all day 1280 x 720 is just too small to be practical.

edit - I too once basked in the warm rays of a 320x200 CRT, it's OK at the time if that's all you've ever experienced, but it's hard to go back to that from 4k.

My 640x480 ARM-powered Psion netBook is crying now...

It was possible to achieve a lot with just 320x200 on 8-bit systems.

Or on programmable calculators (TI, HP, etc.), with just 128x64 or so screen.

Or on Amiga (704|640)x(200|256|400|512).

Or VGA PC 640x480. VGA was for the first time truly enough for an IDE. SVGA 800x600 soon followed. And 1152x864, etc.

So one should definitely be able to manage with 1280x720.

I think we can adapt to whatever is available. I guess one could even manage software development with just a single line (320x8, 40x1 characters) display. It'd certainly be far from optimal, but you could do it.

Of course now I enjoy 4K resolution and multiple monitors...

Or even a dumb terminal (TTY) that prints to physical paper.

I don't think my IBM 3151 has that many pixels.

> even if you live in a terminal all day 1280 x 720 is just too small to be practical.

Works fine for me. Even smaller makes me work on production stuff for weeks at a time. It's a matter of taste.

Here's me living with just a 1280x800 X201 laptop.

It is perfectly practical.

Well let's see, I use a 6x10 font. 1280/6=213 characters horizontally. 720/10=72 characters vertically. I think that is more than enough for a screen that size. Sure I would miss being able to have a zillion terminals open at once, but you pay for portability.

Everyone is trying to show off their nerd cred by bragging about how small their terminals are, but you're right. We have bigger, higher res screens for a reason these days: because they're better. And what's better than one terminal window? Two, side by side. Or four. Or four with a browser window open too. Not possible at 300x200, infinitely possible at 4k.

Hell, right now I have three terminals open. One that I'm using to make changes to a file, another that I'm using to just hit the up arrow and enter to scp the file to a remote server after every change, and another to tail the log file in case there's any errors popping up. Could I do it with one window? Sure. Can I use screen to make it seem like I have three? Of course. But why would I bother when I've got tons of real estate?

The most popular resolution nowadays is still 1366x768, so I would not agree with you there. I have that resolution on my 11" cheomebook and its fine, a 1080p panel would be a big improvement sure but its very far from unusable.

What's the mainline kernel story? Or story for ongoing kernel security updates by other means?

For the A64, mainline support is still very much a work in progress that isn't usable as-is I think.

Why only 2GB? Especially for a device that's not shipping yet. I understand there might be SoC limitations, but I would be really surprised if the A64 cannot support 3 or 4GB.

A53 is a bit on the slow side, but the worst part is that it's not a great (as in, representative of the architectural requirements on software) chip for porting software to AArch64, because of its simplistic design - you will be able to get away with forgetting a barrier, or TLB or cache maintenance instruction here or there, and your code will work (but blow up on other, more advanced uarches, like A57 or other non-ARM designs). It's basically a minor step above using Foundation Model.

I wish they could do exactly the same thing, but the form factor of a Psion 5MX Palmtop

As someone who emails from a Nextcloud instance online, writes and reads a lot of text and logs into a Linux cluster for data analysis in Jupyter Notebooks. This could completely replace my company issues HP Elitebook (price around 1200€), the screen is even better.

I would like it even more if it were just a Raspberry Pi (possibly with a very fast ssd if it were possible) inside, simply because of the support and trust I have in them.

I fully expect it to be an utter piece of junk, but at 89 dollars with 2GB RAM this beats a Raspberry Pi or a Cubietruck hands down on price/performance considering either of the latter require at the very least 100 bucks extra for monitor, keyboard, power supply, SD card, and cabling, after which you're also left with a rats nest of wiring and awful little plastic bits and pieces all over the place.

I've been waiting on this for years! Not specifically THIS, but hardware along these lines. I'd like to see at least 4GB of RAM, and then I think that I could use this with Alpine Linux as my daily driver. Not quite perfect yet, but very close to what I want!

if you don't mind X86, http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/10/24/jumper-ezbook-2-cherr...

Current black friday sale is $178 to $185

I own a Pine 64 board (2GB RAM, 1 gigabit ethernet) based on the same Allwinner A64 SoC. It performs OK for light tasks (Debian), however, it lacks proper graphic acceleration (which is OK for using it as a build server, but short if you want e.g. play YouTube videos, so unless in the case of the laptop hardware accelerated graphics are provided, it would be hard to use it comfortably -if they do, I would love to buy one!-).

Anyone know if more RAM will be plausible for a machine like this in the near future? I'd love to have a new netbook, but 2GB is what my 6+ year old Dell mini 9 has; this wouldn't be a very big upgrade, though a bigger screen and keyboard would make it more suitable for actual work.

If it had a normal keyboard I'd buy one. Amazing little package.

Article says it has full-size QWERTY. In what sense is that, umm, not normal?

It's one of those apple candy keyboards. Typing on those is only slightly better than typing on glass.

Impressive specs, How much cost difference if 1080P screen is used ?

major downside for me is the DC jack for charging, they always break for me...

The entire machine is the same price as an apple power adapter.

To be fair, they have a processor in the power adaptor

Is that processor more or less powerful than the processor in this laptop?

Funny question, but the answer is less powerful.

"This processor is a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller, roughly as powerful as the processor inside the original Macintosh."

"MSP430 is a 16 bit processor running at 16MHz. The Dhrystone benchmark measures 1.4 MIPS."[1]

No doom or rooting your MagSafe adapters.

[1]: http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr...

MSP430 are nice to play around with for hardware projects and they are very cheap, so you can quickly get to cheap products if you start your work with them instead of far more expensive processors.

Is an MSP430 really cheaper than a low end STM32?

I mean the MSP430 was great, 10 years ago, but the industry hasn't stood still.

True, good point. I just have many MSP430 boards lying around, so even blowing up and giving away a few 100 I would be fine hence I go for them when trying something out. I worked on a few projects with low powered bluetooth that had mandatory MSP430 usage so I again something I go for if I have to try something quickly and has the potential to turn into something I want to give away/sell.

Maybe not actual Doom, but that's fast enough to run some sort of FPS at least. Certainly fast enough to be a useful personal computer.

Maybe, it's been ported to commodore 64:

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=doom+on+commodore+64&safe...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com