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lkclon The Libre-SOC Hybrid 3D CPU [pdf]

i appreciate the perspective. with Asperger's, i'm just literal and up-front. i do make it clear that Bob Goudriaans is a Chartered Account, specialising in International Tax Law. perhaps i should also mention that NLnet has been operating for 18 years, now?

no i didn't go into heavy details on the internal architecture, i did the study (with help from Mitch Alsup) on OoO for 5 months straight, back at the beginning of 2019. when he explained how easy it is to do multi-issue if you use Unary (bit-level) encoding on the Dependency Matrices, i went, "ok that's it, we're using that" :)

what the plan is, is to do instead of big.LITTLE, to do "long.FAT" :)

by that i mean, we will have one core that is high multi-issue and high clock rate, but the rest of the cores are MASSIVE on SIMD engines but light on issue (single or dual).

all still SMP, but some cores just absolute processing Monsters.

now, we'll still need a separate Texture Cache (in addition to I-Cache and D-Cache) because texture interpolation, we'll still need a pixel tile memory area, and so on

but we want to see how far we can get and still not have everything shipped over to a completely separate processor. that is madness, the driver development alone having to contain a full-on RPC mechanism. no wonder latency on GPU Shader execution is so bad on commercial CPUs.

lkclon The Libre-SOC Hybrid 3D CPU [pdf]

luckily, through yosys, conversion to Verilog is trivial. and yes, when we get to 22nm (etc) we'll need to license commercial tools from Cadence, Synopsis etc. we're setting up a commercial operation to do that.

right now we're in like "R&D mode", thankfully paid-for by NLnet.

i go into some detail about why we chose nmigen, and what can be done with it. it was not a "light decision", it was several months comprehensive review.

here's the point in the FOSDEM talk i just did: https://youtu.be/7rCeNzrCB_g?t=1939

lkclon The Libre-SOC Hybrid 3D CPU [pdf]

ours will be one of the first or second. Staf from Chips4Makers will be using nmigen-based infrastructure. the nice thing about being charitably-funded to do research is: it's not our personal money. NLnet has offered to pay for a 180nm tape-out, and we also qualify for Google-Skywater 130nm.

also, you may be interested to know: Sorbonne University has access to Cadence. after converting to Verilog, they ran our 180nm design through DRC and it passed 100%.

nmigen has some deterministic behavioural guarantees and much more which make it a far better choice. it happens to output Verilog which we can treat as a (readable) machine-code (assembler-like) intermediary.

lkclon The Libre-SOC Hybrid 3D CPU [pdf]

There's a lot of red flags, from NIH HDL generator language, to using an OoOE core for GPU tasks, to suggesting that you don't talk to your lawyer in the NLNet FAQ

i ask people, if they want to help, not to waste money on talking to lawyers. specifically saying that if they really want to talk to a lawyer they should request that lawyer to donate their time as "pro-bono" due to the charitable funded nature of the project (NLnet is a Charitable Foundation).

i'm kinda stunned that two people actually genuinely asked this, rather than saying "i'll speak to my Accountant".

think about it: imagine being contacted by the Linux Foundation, offered some donations to do some work, and you respond, "oh, errr i demand the right to pay 30% of that charitably-sourced money you are offering me to my Lawyer in fees to check if it's ok to receive that charitably-sourced money", i mean, wtf?? :)

regarding using an OoO engine: you may be interested to review this:

https://www.pixilica.com/post/pixilica-s-founder-atif-zafar-...

we're trying something new, basically. that's down to being funded by NLnet to do innovative research.

lkclon The Libre-SOC Hybrid 3D CPU [pdf]

we're a rather small technically-focussed team, 80% of us with Asperger's (!). right now, we can either focus on making the site look pretty, or we can focus on "getting it done".

if you'd like to see what was done up until around Nov 2020, i've a video of the first boot of the litex BIOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72QmWro9BSE for example. however what would be really helpful would be offers of assistance. we've got funds available, so that's not a "we're looking exclusively for volunteers" thing

second answer: there appears not to be very much to show for it because we had to stop actual "development" work and do several months of planning on the Vectorisation system. however we couldn't start that unless we had a full and proper understanding of OpenPOWER, which was why we first had to do a basic OpenPOWER v3.0B core, and that's what's demo'd in the video.

hope that helps.

lkclon Finding Critical Open Source Projects

btw, just one thing, having seen this slashdot comment: https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17816088&cid=60823...

what i strongly recommend that google do - instead of doing this work which is, as you've probably noticed from the comments, well-meaning but highly likely to be biased - is:

    *make a large donation to NLnet*

don't tell them what to do with the money: leave that up to them. NLnet is extremely good at ensuring that money is used effectively, by requiring that they come up with a project plan involving milestones. they do not just "dump money at the developer", which has a known high historically-backed probability of causing more harm than good: they require the milestones to be completed, 100%, before the money is paid.

note, here: they do not use algorithms to assess a project: they use people. they also assess the proposal against the usefulness of achieving key objectives.

lkclon Finding Critical Open Source Projects

analysing a source-only-based distro (one where the compiler is required as a dependency) should make the importance of the compiler(s) clearer.

source-only distros include macports, gentoo, and so on.

lkclon Finding Critical Open Source Projects

people. as a computer scientist you're probably thinking, "this can be solved by analysing a source code forge" or, "this can be solved by running an algorithm". it can't (or, more to the point: it can tell you quantities, but not quality or value).

i mentioned in another post: github "glorifies" the person and the changes that they make. "look at mee! look at mee! i'm making a commit! i'm wiping my backside now! aren't i great!" which gets you precisely zip in terms of actual strategic value.

changes measure change.

people will tell you - if you let them - by providing you with the information needed to make a qualitative assessment.

so.

provide a type of wiki/website that allows qualitative assessments to be made, on a per-library / per-project basis. then put the metrics (the "criticality value") onto that.

pre-seed that wiki/website with stuff from github if you feel so inclined but DO NOT limit the wiki/website to exclusively github. i repeat again: doing so would be a disastrous mistake.

lkclon Finding Critical Open Source Projects

good advice. "apt-get install apt-rdepends" and it becomes possible to work out the reverse-dependencies of packages.

by counting the numbers it becomes pretty blindingly obvious what the critical dependencies are. as mentioned in another post above, bash and glibc6 are blindingly-obviously high on the list... yet the GNU Project receives an unbelievably low amount of funding despite their critical importance.

likewise, this particular bug in binutils ld, which centres around the incredibly short-sighted "4GB should be enough for anyone" removal of Dr Stallman's memory-resident algorithms in the late 90s, is having some very serious consequences:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22831

yet because there's no money not even from redhat nobody's looking at it.

likewise: PAM no longer has a proper maintainer, and hasn't had for... a decade?

these are projects that people are relying on yet completely forgetting they're a critical part of the infrastructure!

why? because, just as rhencke said above: they're not on github, they've not got "unnecessary changes" which are counted as "activity to be glorified and worshipped".

abharya: i heard on slashdot the intent to start from github, to exclusively focus on github. this will turn out to be a serious mistake.

lkclon Finding Critical Open Source Projects

one of the things that's important is not to include google's lawyers bias against the GPL license. i always wondered where the bias against the GPL came from, within google, and learned of the existence of the in-house legal team. it turns out that they have been advising google employees for some considerable time, "avoid the GPL, avoid the GPL".

unfortunately, as legal advice, those google employees (right the way to management) do not have the backbone to say, "err no actually, GPL-licensed code is the critically strategically important leveller that forces aberrant companies to collaborate rather than sponge off of underfunded projects".

lkclon Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt

nonsense. rocket-chip has been taped out at 45nm and achieved 1.5ghz, years ago. india's shakti core is going into 20nm and as a 6-stage pipeline will run at 2.5ghz. as that one uses only 120mW, even 16 2.5ghz cores would only consume around 3 watts (!!!).

caveat of course: the L1/L2 cache power consumption isn't included in that figure, but, crucially, with the Compressed Instructions reducing cache misses by 20-25% that's equivalent to having approximately double the I-cache size.

basically by a fresh start they're on to a winner.

lkclon Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt

> You won't see high performance open source micrarchitectures that implements RISC-V core.

India's Shakti Core is a 6-stage pipeline that runs at 2.5ghz in 20nm and uses only 120mW. Their roadmap includes VLSI variants which will piss all over ARM and Intel, which is funny because the India Goverment has given them unlimited resources and backing to do exactly that.

All entirely libre-licensed... starting here: https://bitbucket.org/casl/

lkclon Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt

usually in these cases where the CPU is so slow, it simply doesn't have the bus bandwidth even to feed an LCD. so the LCD is an SPI device or 8080 MCU compatible memory-mapped peripheral, that has its own internal SRAM as a framebuffer. a good example is the HX8357D (now obsolete sadly) https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/video/...

technically speaking it's perfectly possible to use an 8mhz 8-bit arduino-style processor to make a phone, if all you want is calls and SMS! the processor inside the actual GSM/3G modem is far, far more powerful than that.

i added up the number of actual processors in a smartphone once: it was insane. DSP in the Audio IC. ARM core in the GPS. ARM core in the 3G Modem. ARM core in the main processor. 8051 core in the capacitive touchpanel controller. the list just goes on and on!

lkclon Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt

https://github.com/RoaLogic/vga_lcd

richard herveille created one 16 years ago which can do the job. it's silicon-proven: ICubeCorp put it into their IC3128.

lkclon Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt

I'll be presenting a talk at the Chennai 9th RISC-V workshop about doing precisely this: a Libre RISC-V SoC. http://libre-riscv.org/shakti/m_class/ and yes, it is indeed as complicated as you describe.

Fortunately there are people out there who are not intimidated by the prospects of tackling such large projects, projects which in their own right are licensed by proprietary companies for enormous sums of money. DDR3 costs USD $1m minimum to license a SINGLE-USE controller and PHY. So I tracked down libre-licensed controllers and PHYs libre-riscv.org/shakti/m_class/DDR/

It turns out that there's around two or three libre-licensed controllers, and Symbiotic EDA are happy to do a libre-licensed DDR3 PHY for USD $300k, and to convert it to DDR4 for another $300k. It'll take them a year but that's fine.

Then there is SATA and PCIe (which are not going into the Libre RISC-V SoC), by enjoy-digital: https://github.com/enjoy-digital

These are entirely libre-licensed PHYs that have been used in production ASICs.

Then there is also a USB3 Pipe implementation: you can see that enjoy-digital wrote a test for it https://github.com/enjoy-digital/daisho_usb3ipcore_test/tree...

RGMII is available... http://libre-riscv.org/shakti/m_class/RGMII/

Richard Herveille has RGB/TTL (VGA) and that can be connected externally to an SSD2828, SN75LVDS83b or its china clone NT7181, or a TFP410a, or a Chrontel CH7036 or equivalent. https://github.com/RoaLogic/vga_lcd

Interestingly whilst SD/MMC is available as libre-licensed, eMMC is not. So that has to be dealt with.

Video processing blocks are available for constructing all sorts of algorithms (without running into hardware-level patent licensing issues, because they're blocks not full algorithms) https://opencores.org/project/video_systems

3D is however really tricky, you are absolutely right, so I have a place-holder page here http://libre-riscv.org/shakti/m_class/libre_3d_gpu/ where I'm inviting anyone with expertise to step forward, to collaborate to get something done.

And yes, your comment that it's not particularly exciting in academia, and that they totally lack novelty, is spot on! SoCs with 3D and Video on which you and your kids can watch Monster School, FGeeTV, and play Minecraft, RoBlox and Neko Atsume is indeed neither academically exciting nor novel.

With the exception of the 3D part, which Jeff Bush kindly resesarched extremely well, in the form of Nyuzi, by replicating the Intel Larrabee Team's paper in which they developed a recursive rasterisation algorithm. https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki

Who the heck are you, anyway, you seem to be quite insightfully well-informed? :)

lkclon Momentum builds for open-source processors (2001)

would you be interested - and self-motivated - to help get an entirely libre RISC-V SoC up and running, that has the building blocks of a VPU and also enough Vector Processing in some form to do decent 3D graphics as well? tools are paid for. access to foundries is available (20nm, 28nm, 40nm). engineering resources via the shakti project are also available. http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/shakti/m_class/ if so do get in touch, luke.leighton@gmail.com

lkclon Momentum builds for open-source processors (2001)

the cost of doing say a 180nm chip is somewhere around... USD $10,000. that's $10,000 per shot... and you end up with something around... maybe... 200mhz maximum? and consuming vast amounts of power, relative to today's technology?

here's the really interesting thing: i've been in touch with the head of the shakti team, madhu, and he tells me that the Indian Govt has basically given him CARTE BLANCH to design processors for primarily the indian market but also world-wide distribution.

the "catch"? due to Intel getting into bed with the NSA, the entire chip and its associated source code MUST be entirely libre, right down to the bedrock.

funnily enough, i don't have a problem with that... do you? :)

so in discussions with him last week (he is very busy on a tape-out deadline at the moment), he said that he would be happy to offer the open hardware community free access to the university's 180nm fab, to be able to do proof-of-concept testing, and that he also wants to make available his team and expertise to create an entirely libre RISC-V multi-core SoC. i have done a preliminary design here: http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/shakti/m_class/

various foundries have offered free MVP samples, and various other companies have offered free access to tools that normally cost USD $80m to license. this on the basis that the Indian local market is so... INSANELY LARGE that they recognise that they will make literally billions of dollars over the next few years.

so it's getting very interesting.

lkclon The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

so, you're doing some research on 3 or 4 different simultaneous projects. one is in particle physics (a part-time interest) where you need to find related articles on nature, arxiv, vixra and the general internet. google search, click darn that was useless and took too long to load anyway, hmmm, how about i right-button open-in-new-tab on half a dozen of these pages, let them load in the background whilst i go to page 2 of those search results? ah ha! yes! that works well!

okaay, so there's now 10 potential useful articles to read, they're already loaded (yippee, saves time...) hmmm let's go through them hmm... that one's useless (close) that one's useless (close) that one looks interesting but i don't have time to read it immediately....

---->>> LET'S KEEP IT OPEN FOR NOW * <<<< ----

.... and move on whoops the phone's ringing i have to deal with a client's urgent issue, he also needs something to be fixed okay so it's an obscure issue i don't know anything about let's do some google searches damn we're under time-pressure again let's do the same trick, right-mouse-button on a stackexchange liiink, right-mouse-button open-in-new-tab on a forum paaaage, right-mouse-button on some git repository browser because i might need to compile that up or investigaaaate...

okay now the tabs are open and loaded don't have to wait for them to load let's review them... close, close, read, read, close, read.... hmm that looks like it's got the info i need, but...

---->>>> LET'S KEEP THE TAB OPEN IN CASE I NEED IT AGAIN TO FIX THE CLIENT'S PROBLEM IN THE FUTURE <<<<<----

okaay so i have time to go back to that particle physics research now and i can carry on where i was interrupted ...

--->>>> * BECAUSE I LEFT THE TABS OPEN.... * <<<<-----

repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. the technique saves vast amounts of time (through proper use of parallelism), uses the browser itself as a proper research tool, as well as an information storage mechanism "with history". the actual "browse history" itself i have found to be pretty damn useless, i can never find anything as it doesn't have a proper useable UI.

from your enquiry i should imagine that you're one of these people who sits there waiting for a page to load, sequentially, then closes it... sequentially. depth-first in other words. by which time it's been so long that you've forgotten what you were searching for. for those people who use internet search engines to do breadth-first searches, tabs are absolutely invaluable.

lkclon The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

vimperator aka pentadactyl. works really well and if you press the alt key you get the "standard" menu back. it increases screen real-estate, and i love it. it's by no means perfect but i won't go back to standard key bindings in firefox... ever. yes i also have 200-300 tabs open in firefox, and maintain them there for months at a time. firefox continues to eat memory (i got a laptop with 16 GB of RAM just to cope with how insane firefox gets) so a restart is necessary on a regular basis... that's done inside pentadactyl with ":restart".

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

enshrined in patent law is the right for anyone to implement a single instance of a patent, so that they may improve on it.

source code that's downloaded and then compiled thus constitutes "a single instance".

if the fuckers at broadcom had stopped for one second and thought, "we really should release the full source and just let people get on with it, because after all this is about education", then there wouldn't BE any need for them to collect royalties.

instead they went "we make money from this, therefore we should continue to exploit school children".

broadcom DOES NOT have to distribute binary versions of their CODECs. they COULD have chosen instead to release full source code under libre licenses. the fact that they are distributing binaries tells you everything you need to know.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

> the project lead, who was, um, difficult

ah! it's been so long, i've been so busy i couldn't remember who you were, out of curiosity had to look you up. yes. i remember. from successful experience of 10 years using wikis for note-taking in reverse-engineering projects, you insisted on posting unstructured information to a mailing list where it was then utterly impossible for anyone to find it (i don't mean me), help you with it (i don't mean me), collaborate with you on it (i don't mean me)

so... let's rewrite what you said to reflect it from your perspective.

> the project lead who has a lot of experience in > complex reverse-engineering, ongoing documentation, > information management and software libre, asked > me to respect certain rules... and i refused to do > so, causing his life and everybody's life to > become, um, "difficult"

you were causing me a significant amount of work by having to cut/paste things that you were writing to the list instead of putting them in the wiki and sending a link as i asked you to do, so that i was the one that was forced to clean up after you. not really very fair of you to do that to someone is it... but you blamed me for that? uhn??? how does that work??

so... yeah - that you left the list was a good thing because i was able to focus on what i was doing rather than having to clean up after you. sorry if you felt that that was unfair or "a run-in" or was "difficult", but it's real simple: when trying to find important information, if it's unstructured, it might as well not ever have been written. there's only so much that a google search can achieve. i trust that in the intervening years you've learned that by now.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

yeah exactly. now, here's the thing: if you want to plug in newer hypocritical-boards...

... i'm sorry, you may be confused by the use of that phrase - allow me to explain before completing the sentence. broadcom is a highly unethical company that was caught completely off-guard by the rbpi phenomenon. their MOQ for this processor is 5 million units. the only reason they allowed it is because it was for "education" and it was one of their own employees working on it.

now, when you get one of these "education" boards, the first thing that happens is that a proprietary program is uploaded to the GPU, which then and only then turns on the CPU. this should be ringing massive alarm bells already for anybody who knows that respecting the privacy of children is fundamentally important.

but if that's not enough, if these children wish to watch films on these "educational" devices, they are forced to pay $2.50 to a cartel in order to obtain - not information but a PROPRIETARY library.

so here's the message that broadcom tells kids: "we want you to get educated! you're free to do so... except no further than WE say you can. fuck off kids if you want to educate yourself about the way our cartelled business makes money".

total hypocrisy.

now, i'm keenly aware that they're under enormous pressure to release the GPU's inner details, but dumping the tools onto the software libre community and expecting them to pick up the pieces doesn't strike me as being particularly responsible either.

anyway so back to answering your comment... :)

so if you want to plug in 15mm high boards you need a housing that can cope with 15mm high boards. you want a pi-top in other words not this one. if you've seen the pi-top, however, you'll notice that it's almost 1.25 in thick, possibly even more! there are other issues with it as well, such as: the team haven't fulfilled their promises to be open with the schematics or the 3D CAD files.

i've taken a heck of a lot of issues into consideration in the design of the 15.6in laptop housing, basically as a demonstration to the industry that there is another way.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

allo mwcampbell, did i see you on reddit a few days ago? so much has happened so fast :)

i understood it differently, but there are definitely people who don't want today's low-power tablet-style processors in a desktop computer.

(aside: let's remember that tomorrow's desktop processors will be lower power and more powerful even than today's tablet-style processors!)

those people are the ones that i'm specifically not targetting, here. i'm targetting the "good enough" crowd. and the makers. and the libre people. and those who are fed up with being spied on through devices that they paid for. we don't like paying to be snooped on, that's just f*g cheek.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

http://linux-sunxi.org/EGON#eGON.BRM

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

  It had, e.g., a big chunk of code bolted on that
  loaded a binary data file at boot time and
  configured the various peripherals.

that's all been reverse-engineered, in fact the source for boot0/boot1 is now properly GPL'd.

i don't know who you are but we probably both contributed at different times - i was the one who released the first linux and u-boot kernel source to the public via my server, and later on did a usb sniff of the USB-FEL traffic by putting LIVESUIT.EXE into qemu, configuring qemu to give it access to one of the USB ports and uploading an OS to one of my Computer Cards. that was enough for Henrik (hno) and others to complete the fex-boot program. i love doing that stuff.

anyway, upshot is: after a LOT of work by a LOT of people (including yourself it sounds like), the A20 is one of the few china processors that's fully libre reverse-engineered for its boot process, contains no DRM, and even the Video decode engine and 2D GPU are now reverse-engineered.

there aren't very many processors you can say that about - if you do know of any please tell me because i will need to make an in-depth evaluation.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

> 1. Is there any RISC-V silicon available?

not anything useful

> 2. Is there even a complete spec for RISC-V?

yes.

> 3. At that level of paranoia, you're always going > to probe deeper... Suppose someone inserted backdoors > into your RISC-V core. Suppose the fab house has > backdoors in the layout tools. Suppose an oversight > committee got paid off...

the damage that would be done to the reputation of any company stupid enough to allow backdoors to be slipped into their tools would be... they'd be finished. absolutely NOBODY would trust them EVER AGAIN - not their billion-dollar customers or the Military or the Intelligence Services that utilise their tools on a daily basis.

no - what you're suggesting is, far from being a plausible scenario, is in fact those companies WORST NIGHTMARE scenario because it's the day that they go out of business and probably have agents from all over the world queueing up to murder them! i love that film with john travolta, "this is incredible. i never seen anything like this. ya actually gotta get in line to whack this guy"....

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

we don't have a lot of choice at the moment, from a practical and self-funding perspective which retains 100% control and thus can remain true to its ethical business roots. i outline a SMALL selection of the dozens of processors evaluated over the past five years, here:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/pic...

since then i've been alerted to 2 more processors... but anyway the point is: out of all the ones on that list, the A20 is by far and above the most "ethical" one - irony that, given allwinner's background - that we can GAIN ACCESS to, that is also capable of running 1080p60 video so that people can go "ehhh.... yeahh okay, i could put up with that for a year whilst these guys figure out the next Computer Card".

now, there's been a lot of discussion and evaluation on various other forums including phoronix and reddit about RISC-V, i was going to do a separate update about it, but basically, RISC-V is not ready for prime-time.

or, more specifically, the people doing SoCs based around RISC-V haven't yet put something together that would match the minimum functional requirements of EOMA68. those requirements are quite modest, including 18-pin RGB/TTL @ 1366x768, SD/MMC, I2C, SPI, UART, PWM GPIO, EINT GPIO and 2 USB interfaces... but they still haven't actually managed that. the closest team that has is the lowRisc team.

now, on top of that, we need operating systems. it's no good trying to think you're going to raise $1m on crowdfunding selling 10,000 computers if the only OSes available are based on "linux from scratch" or "buildroot" for embedded computers. you need debian, you need android, you need chromeos, you need arch, parabola, gentoo - everybody needs to get on board.

once you become aware of these things you start to realise that RISC-V based SoCs and required OSes are at least 3 to 8 years out, so it would be much much better to start with something like MIPS64 for now.

if you know of a way to raise between $5m and $10m i can start that process NOW and have a chip ready in about 18 to 24 months. i've been through the process back in 2012 (google "Towards an FSF Endorseable Processor slashdot") so know what needs to get done.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

the Allwinner A20, amazingly has Virtualisation: it's a Cortex A7 (the baby brother of the A15). google "Xen allwinner A20" for instructions on how to set it up. i'm looking forward one day to trying out android where it belongs: as a highly restricted and compartmentalised "application" that can be run full-screen on the desktop of a trusted OS.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

> Maybe if Microsoft and Intel hadn't both given up on phones

maybe there's a backlash against the wintel cartel that leads people to no longer trust them. maybe the DRM-locking that goes onto the microsoft phones and intel-based phones respectively is enough that people are absolutely sick of them.

lkclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

* how compatible are all the different file-formats? * have you worked out how to bypass the DRM inherent in many of these phones? * does the device even have a means to transfer the data! ipads force you to use "cloud" services (other people's computers) for goodness sake!