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Comment by kop316 | Hacker News Reader

My main concern with this DIY laptop is if they are mainlining everything for Linux and U-boot. It looks to be entirely open source (due to the use of the NXP/Freescale i.MX8MQ and the work going into that).

This unfortunately happened with the Novena. It was entirely open source, but there were a lot of out of tree patches that had to be applied to get a kernel fully functional. This meant that it was effectively frozen at 4.4 without someone to dedicate a lot of time to port the changes to a newer kernel (I say that as someone who tried, and gave up, to try to port the changes to 4.9).

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So this is a bit off-topic, but I pulled out my Novena this past weekend to work on an SDR project and after updating the installed packages I started wondering about the process of keeping these devices running up-to-date software and the community around it.

Are you able to offer any insight about how I, a developer with only a little embedded experience, could learn enough about the process to meaningfully contribute to keeping the Novena up-to-date? Is there still a community around the Novena?

Sure! Look at my github:

https://github.com/chris4795

I tried to document what I did as much as possible for others to look at it. I recall I was able to update it to Stretch (with linux 4.4, not linux 4.9) and I was able to make the whole boot process/update process more debian friendly.

u-boot-novena is where I put all of the scripts needed in order to get the whole process to work with Debian Mainline.

The forums:

https://kosagi.com/forums/

Also have most of the good bits of nuggets to figure it out too (that's how I figured out most of what I did). I don't know how much of a community around it there is anymore though (I really haven't looked in years).

EDIT: It looks like jookia actually did a lot of work and upgraded the Novena to Buster:

https://www.kosagi.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=542

I may try it sometime.

Thanks! I'm not sure how I overlooked the forums. It looks like there is someone there who has ported everything to Buster, so it looks like there is at least enough of a community to see some new software releases and hopefully offer some more pointers in how to contribute.

It's already running an almost mainline kernel: https://twitter.com/mntmn/status/1259611758827835394 and what is left looks like it would be easy to get upstreamed. I don't know about the u-boot situation, but one can always ask Lukas on twitter ^^

I have a Novena around collecting dust too and used it a lot while it was still getting patches. I'm actually more excited about the reform2, and already held a prototype unit at 36C3. It's very much what got me excited about open hardware laptops in the first place, but packaged in a more user-centric way. the Novena was always a pita to use on the go.

I'm glad to hear it! If those are mainlined I would be a lot more excited about this.

I imagine it uses u-boot already, that doesn't seem as hard to port to a system and upstream (I got vanilla u-boot working on a Novena, but it did not have some of the patches that bunnie and xobs put to it).

This is one reason that I tend to like things like the CutiePi (Pi-based tablet) that reuses an already-supported SoC/"motherboard"; I already expect the Pi to either be mainline or have enough support that any out-of-tree patches will be maintained.

What's the trouble of getting it upstreamed? Too many quick hacks that warrant a proper solution?

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