RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13 is now available | Hacker News Reader

RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13 is now available

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They put the old (55WH vs the newer 61WH) battery in the shell -- Framework you cheapos! I guess they are trying to get rid of the old, smaller batteries.

Also, word of warning just don't apply the 3.08 bios update if you have a 12th gen. I've had nothing but problems with the 3.08 bios update without real remediation from framework. Really, don't perform this upgrade without doing a thorough review of the support forums regarding the issues people are having.

There was a blog post about the BIOS update that i found here on this site, but i'm having trouble finding it for reference now. Someone had the same issue as i have where sometimes my system just won't boot (no video and error sequence) unless i remove or re-add a memory module. Not that fun.

IMO that's a smart choice. This cpu isn't made to be a daily driver. It only is in a laptop chasis to make R&D easier. No one will miss the extra 5WH

Some people will put it as as small server somewhere, then this battery is like a backup power for servers but built-in. Framework even sells a small case for this sort of usage. If I had skin in that game, I would do this. For developping end-user software, just ssh in and program away!

IIUC, the chemistry with a typical UPS battery would be much more favorable for constant power than a laptop... with probably-questionable management software to boot

I say this while truly enjoying my F13; nothing against them

The latest firmware update included changes to how the battery management handles long-term constant power. Too soon to say how much it helps, but it at least is a thing they are addressing.

sometimes my Thinkpad Carbon X1 gen6 refuses to turn on until i disassemble it and disconnect the battery... about once a year.

it's rare enough to scare me for a moment each time that it has died on me...

I have always had issues with this on my Lenovo X1 series laptops. Why is that?

I had same issues with some quite new Dell XPS Carbon and Asus ROG gaming laptops. Battery disconection is first thing I do after laptop is not turning on.

Crappy BIOS/power management controller does not depend on price of the laptop or manufacturer.

That is what happened to my Asus 1215B netbook. Taking out the battery used to fix the boot being stuck on UEFI, until not even that last year.

It took about 4 years to die, and served me from 2009 - 2024, so still quite a long life.

Interesting CPU choice. Seems like it's actually intended for image processing...

https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/soc

Consumer image/video processing is one of the few applications where requirements of low cost, high performance, and tolerance of poor software support and low reliability converge. It makes a lot of sense that StarFive would target that application. Most of the SoC vendors from China are competing in this same space, like Allwinner, Rockchip, Goke, Ingenic, SigmaStar, Ambarella, Fullhan, Xiongmai, etc.

I hope they can update it with a chip that has the vector extension

I was just looking at modern Thinkpad T14 offerings (Gen6). They offer ARM snapdragon and AMD. No Intel. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/c/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/

Times are changing

> They offer ARM snapdragon and AMD.

They seem to come with Windows ARM pre-installed, but if one wanted to (also?) run Linux on them, which distro(es) would be available?

None. I was down-voted during the launch for saying that there won't be any meaningful support from Qualcomm and 6 months later ... there is none. Browse reddit thread to see how thing are (non)working on Qualcomm based laptops.

really? I know there's quite a few arm64 distributions ... that's pretty strange. What about WSL2 and what about NetBSD?

"Really" as a surprise or you are confronting the veracity of my statement?

No, NetBSD is not working on Qualcomm based laptops. I also know quite a few arm64 distributions ... like LineageOS, which works OK-ish on my phone.

This thread however is about laptops in a sense one expects from the laptop, i.e. hardware accelerated video, WiFi 5 and above, bluetooth, woking sleep/resume.

I don't understand what exactly is strange here for you.

They must not care about Linux as much as I think. I thought it's kinda standard these days to release laptops that plausibly work with at least Ubuntu, in some limited way.

I must live in a bubble.

I would say Linux support even for modern x86 laptops is not great. Take for example Zenbook S series, both AMD and Intel. While most of the things are kind of working, they are not that stable. I would say Linux support peaked somewhere on 12th generation Intel laptops.

For me, ACPI is the one thing that never seems to work quite right. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong

I don't have any problems with Ubuntu 24.04 on my i9-13900HX Lenovo Legion Pro 5i.

It's never crashed, I never reboot it, sleep works fine. It spends almost all its time sitting with the lid closed, sshing in from my Mac, using 13W-15W depending on whether it's in eco/smart/performance mode, then boosting to 160W or so if I ask it to do something serious.

When I do take it mobile, it runs for about 5 hours doing light stuff in eco mode, vs 6 hours when it has Windows on it. The difference isn't really a problem as it disappears if you give it some real work to do. That's not Arm Mac battery life, but it's 2 or 3 hours more than I ever actually need. I've got it set up to keep running closed on AC, sleep if the AC disappears. Works great, and it's going instantly from sleep with a keypress if I open it.

Really, no complaints at all.

It's not about the arm as an instruction set (I'm writing this from the arm machine running linux). It's the drivers, bootloader, all the fdt glue. You don't just need support for arm, but for the specific board on the specific SOC.

Want a different board on a soc that already works? Welcome to the world of writing this kind of things: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm64/boo... and compiling the kernel from some dude's branch instead of going with mainline.

I have the risc thing too, that magically works on mainline kernel somehow, but is slow.

With UEFI lots of arm64 distros both Linux and BSD should boot, but quite possibly have very poor periferal support. pcie and graphics seem like likely candidates. If pcie isn’t working you may be able to load a ram disk, but it wouldn’t be usable as a laptop. (Given nvme storage)

IIRC my X13s has experimental right next to booting Linux, and I doubt any of the newer models are better. Honestly not a great sign even though Windows forced the use of UEFI.

> None. I was down-voted during the launch for saying that there won't be any meaningful support from Qualcomm and 6 months later

You were - and are - wrong. Qualcomm mainlined enough drivers for in the same window (past 6 months) so one can boot and install the latest Linux kernel on several Snapdragon X laptops from different OEMs. There are people running Fedora and an Ubuntu Experimental[1] builds. Its still rough, depending on ones device tree, the peripherals line microphone, webcam, and/or fan control may not work right now, but it's a platform that's actively being developed for.

1. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...

> You were - and are - wrong.

Let me post the quote from your link from other users then:

A recent post

" Beyond that, I still have the following issues (Thinkpad T14s 64GB):

Internal webcam not working Internal speakers/mic not working Suspend not working (only goes into suspend if not attached to a screen; it drains around 50% of bat overnight) "

Another post from 4 days ago

"Is there separate bug-tracking for display related things somewhere? Currently I have the following issues:

internal screen: no backlight control one 4k screen: cannot boot with it plugged in (hang after grub); but plugging it in afterwards works. Sometimes the screen shows only 640x480, but unplugging and replugging fixes it. another 4k screen: no problems booting with it or with resolutions. third screen (3440x1440): if the screen turns off (e.g. after time in idle), it never turns back on. However, swaymsg -t get_outputs reports it as connected and even as focused when I move the mouse there. Unplugging and replugging the screen does not fix this. The only way to get the screen back on is killing the session (gdm does manage to bring it back online). HDMI does not work [T14s, IPS screen, 64GB] "

I mentioned broken peripherals in the comments you responded to. You're moving goals.

>> which distro(es) would be available?

> None

Me: there's Ubuntu 24.10 build specifically for Snapdragon X Elite ARM computers

You: that distro is buggy

Me: but it exists, because Qualcomm mainlined code to Linus' kernel tree.

Weirdly, it had good Linux support before launch and then it somehow went away.

it's wrong. I have tried a Debian distro running on a Snapdragon based machine just last month. Not everything was perfect. but it worked well enough that you could use Box64 to run some Windows games.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676553

First of all, the post wasn't downvoted, and secondly, someone pointed out that it's being worked on, as another commented pointed out here as well. I hope being corrected twice is enough to prevent repetition.

It might have been downvoted at first.

> it's being worked on

What is the state of hardware accelerated video playback 8 months later? More specifically video playback in chrome/chromium?

Check this thread https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/jan-2025-state-of-linu...

> I hope being corrected twice is enough to prevent repetition.

What exactly you are correcting?

Maybe I was unclear, thus let me quote other users, data point from 2 days ago:

"I'm running Debian with a 6.12-ish kernel with some Qualcomm patches. I still don't have working audio from the built-in speakers or onboard headphone jack, the kernel can't tell how much charge the battery has (and it goes through a full charge about twice as fast as Windows would), ollama has no clue how to use the built-in NPU, and my graphics are still reporting software rendering."

It supports standard UEFI boot, Ubuntu has a WIP image you can use that has some extra patches, and with some fiddling you can get other distros, assuming you use a really recent kernel with a supported device tree and maybe you need some firmware updates and a kernel patch or two (search 'x1e' in the Linux tree to see if yours is in there.) Wifi, USB-C etc work last I checked. Not sure about BT or general sound support or anything like that.

Overall though, things "work" but as far as usable goes, it seems to remain in a pretty poor state; especially given the lack of accelerated graphics combined with no NUC/SFF options. I guess WSL2 is probably okay. But it's a shame, because the hardware does seem pretty nice.

When some NUC options come out you'll at least be able to use it in a headless form factor, I guess.

postmarketOS runs on the ThinkPad X13s. I don't see a wiki entry for this specific model, so I assume it doesn't work out of the box, and "maybe" with an undefined amount tinkering.

An experimental build of Ubuntu 24.10 for Snapdragon X Elite ARM computers is available[1] today from Canonical. It's denoted as "Experimental" because its very bleeding edge, and under active development. It boots and is installable, but is not ready for casual users yet.

1. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...

Debian works on it, but graphics support is still very early.

Works is a bit of an understatement, with a package library that's close to surpassing that of ppc64[0], thus becoming the third largest.

I've used mine as a desktop for a while, but now it's been repurposed as home server.

It runs Debian trixie (still not frozen, just sid + small delay), with a generic kernel (not vendor crap) and root on ZFS, a 1TB M.2 SSD, with an external 22TB disk, also ZFS, on UASP USB3 enclosure.

Compared to the rpi4 it replaces, it is somehow actually faster. Sustains 70MB/s aes decrypt (luks), where the rpi4 gave me <50MB/s.

Graphics support is indeed early and tied to an ancient vendor kernel, but Imagination Technologies is funding the mesa3d effort. It will eventually (hopefully soon, there's been hints recently) simply just work with open drivers.

0. https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png

This Reddit thread [1] says that the battery lasts ~22h based on some benchmarks. The vendor claim was at ~29h but I think the point is to be comparable to Apple chips. Indeed is a game changer.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1efsvcj/lenovo_cl...

Cool. Now make a mainboard with a POWER 10 (IBM)

and

something like the Altra Max M128

Would probably need to create a "hood", extender between the case and they keyboard to fit. and increase the fans a it </s>

I would legit love to have a POWER10 laptop. No reason it couldn't be scaled down to laptop power profiles, though I have no idea who would provide a GPU for it.

There's Verisilicon, Imagination, Broadcom, and probably even ARM licensing out GPU IP blocks to anyone with capital.

Getting AMD on board could be a little trickier but could be feasible with a compute SOC deal balancing the deal out (this is a pipe dream).

https://www.phoronix.com/news/IBM-POWER10-Not-All-Open-FW

Sadly POWER10 is not entirely open and the reasonning behind having a power laptop/computer was to have an entirely open computer

Whilst it is true indeed that POWER10 requires an opaque blob of firmware goo, Raptor was supposed to bring a follow-up to POWER9 that uses the Solid Silicon S1[0] instead of POWER10:

  Raptor yesterday officially announced that we're not getting Power10 systems. The idea is we're going to be getting something better: the Solid Silicon S1. It's Power ISA 3.1 and fully compatible, but it's also a fully blob-free OpenPOWER successor to the POWER9, avoiding Power10's notorious binary firmware requirement for OMI RAM and I/O.

 […] the S1's specs, and he said it's a PCIe 5.0 DDR5 part running from the high 3GHz to low 4GHz clock range, with the exact frequency range to be determined. (OMI-based RAM not required!) The S1 is bi-endian, SMT-4 and will support at least two sockets with an 18-core option confirmed for certain and others to be evaluated. This compares very well with the Power10, which is also PCIe 5.0, also available as SMT-4 (though it has an SMT-8 option), and also clocks somewhere between 3.5GHz and 4GHz.

I have not heard of Solid Silicon before, and their website[1] does not reveal much other than indirectly ascertaining the non-laptop factor of the S1 SoC(?).

[0] https://www.talospace.com/2023/10/the-next-raptor-openpower-...

[1] https://www.solidsilicon.com/desktop/index.html

I don't think I can buy this in my country at a reasonable price.

It is very hard to pay online for me as amazon broke interop with noscript/basic (x)html browsers a few years ago (and you can pay using local wallet codes with using your credit card info online).

It's not difficult to use Firefox. You just don't want to.

How is it humanly possible to miss the point that much?

Pure evil AI?

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