Open Hardware Leftovers

Published on Tux Machines (http://www.tuxmachines.org) Home > content > Open Hardware Leftovers Open Hardware Leftovers By Roy Schestowitz Created 09/12/2020 - 7:52am Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 9th of December 2020 07:52:49 AM Filed under Hardware [1] Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone (Part 1 of ???) [2] Huzzah! I recently received my Librem 5 (Evergreen) from Purism. The Librem 5 is a smartphone that runs an otherwise standard linux kernel. However, unlike Android which also relies on the linux kernel under the hood, the Librem 5 uses a GNU userspace, adapted for mobile. This makes it more akin to your typical laptop in some ways, although the form factor still resembles a modern smartphone (at least, mostly). Here are some preliminary thoughts about the phone and how it compares to Pine64?s Pinephone, which is another phone that uses neither Android nor iOS, and relies on a GNU / Linux based OS. Lilbits: ARM computers, Linux phones, and the Pixel 2 rides off into the sunset[3] There were two reasons I decided the time was right to upgrade. First, my aging phone?s battery was toast ? I often had to plug it in to charge multiple times each day. And second, it was reaching end of life. Today Google rolled out the final official OTA update for Pixel 2 phones, but my new phone should receive OS and security updates for the next three years. SiFive's RISC-V HiFive Unmatched Upgraded To Ship With 16GB Of RAM - Phoronix [4] Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing. The HiFive Unmatched as announced in October features the SiFive FU740 SoC with four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The board has a 32MB SPI flash chip, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, one PCI Express x16 slot (at x8 speeds), one NVMe M.2 slot, microSD, and Gigabit Ethernet. The HiFive Unmatched $665 USD price point is much better than the earlier HiFive Unleashed board price. Preventing Fragmentation with the Librem 5 ? Purism [5] Fragmentation is a massive problem in computer software development that has only gotten worse with mobile computers. By fragmentation I?m referring to incompatible platforms that require a developer to maintain separate forks of their code. Twenty years ago if you wanted to write software for an end user, you had to decide whether to support Windows, Macs or Linux. Each of those platforms required you to build, test, and maintain different forks of your software. Fast forward to today, and at a minimum a developer has to decide whether to develop a ?mobile app? or a ?desktop app? and depending on that choice, has to decide whether to support Android or iOS (and if they want to be fancy, all of the Android forks and different mobile-only Linux OSes), or Windows, MacOS and Linux, or potentially all of the above! Each platform means a separate fork, a separate set of libraries and in some cases means you have to develop your application in a completely different language with a completely different framework! Fragmentation means developers must divide their limited time and attention between different codebases and understand the nuances of each platform. Fragmentation wastes valuable developer time. Since so many of these applications are proprietary (especially true for mobile apps), developers also typically can?t rely on the community to step in and port and support their application on a different platform. Hardware Source URL: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/145246 Links: [1] http://www.tuxmachines.org/taxonomy/term/39 [2] https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2020/12/06/Librem-5-Evergreen-vs-Pinephone/ [3] https://liliputing.com/2020/12/lilbits-arm-computers-linux-phones-and-the-pixel-2-rides-off-into-the-sunset.html [4] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HiFive-Unmatched-16GB [5] https://puri.sm/posts/preventing-fragmentation-with-the-librem-5/.

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