[coreboot] Well supported energy efficient HTPC motherboard

[Oliver Schinagl]

On 27-07-13 18:36, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> 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.
Yes, the pi is the worst choice in term of openness and I despise it 
because of it.
There however are 2 reasons why I'm using it. a) It was a company 
Christmas gift to 'get hacking on new idea's so I have one and don't 
have much else to use it for (for now!)
b) I use it for the upstairs TV. I've tried several ways to connect vga 
-> scart (and even the TV-out port on my ancient ATI x1300 card) as svhs 
-> tv which simply didn't work properly. So with that plan temporarily 
suspended I only had my cubie's and the pie. The pie is the only one 
that works reliably with composite out :p
>
> 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.
I'm very where aware of the cubieboards, I have received development 
boards of C1 and C2 aswel as the olimex A20. This as i'm heavily 
involved in linux-sunxi (kernel commits, u-boot commits) :) So I know. 
Hardware decode is currently an issue, the libs are old and don't always 
work correctly and of course there's the mali. But that could have all 
been worked around, if only I had composite out, or svhs out.

I should get a mele with a20 one of these days, as it does have the 
proper connections, but the software side needs to get polished a bit. 
Also I think we need a proper infrared driver as the current one doesn't 
work as input/lirc device (don't quote me on that).

So until I have time to resolve these issues, the raspberry pi has the 
big advantage that raspbmc works okay-ish via composite.

As open vs closed; I suppose they stand on equal grounds (for now). 
Broadcom GPU vs mali + cedarx; u-boot only is useable via SD (nand 
requires livesuit to flash, but work on a MTD driver is very close) vs 
Broadcom GPU.

Oliver
>
> Regards,
> Carl-Daniel
>