[coreboot] Well supported energy efficient HTPC motherboard

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi Oliver,

Am 22.07.2013 10:07 schrieb Oliver Schinagl:
> What I haven't seen is a suggestion for an energy efficient HTPC.
> While one would expect an arm box for this, I still fail to see really
> well supported fully open systems. I guess the Raspberry Pi comes
> closest.

If your criterion is the openness of the device, the Raspberry Pi is one
of the worst choices available. The camera (CSI) and display (DSI)
interfaces are under strict control of the Raspberry Pi foundation. For
the CSI camera port, you can only use the officially approved camera, no
other device will work (and you can't fix this yourself because the
graphics firmware is closed source). The DSI display port is completely
unusable until the PRi foundation decides what to do with it. The
ethernet connection is done via USB to be as slow as possible. The USB
host controller is broken from a hardware perspective and not fixable in
software (some stuff won't work at all, some will hang). Besides that,
its CPU is really really slow and lacking features. You can't even run
any Ubuntu newer than 9.10 because the CPU is so limited/ancient.

Pick a Cubieboard2 or one of the Allwinner-based Olinuxino boards. They
might not be a popular choice, but you can use fully open graphics
drivers (limadriver) on those boards. The A20 CPU is also pretty powerful.
If you don't care about open source graphics support, a Beaglebone Black
would be a really good choice as well.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/