alt Hacker NewsI wonder if the limitation of the application processor and Linux starting is mostly a default for the standard OS or an actual limitation. Typically with a hybrid SoC like this part of the point is that you can use the micro-controller as the power efficient thing that decides when the bigger application processor should boot or not. I'd be curious to see if that's possible with this one.
Shipping only Debian to start is fine by me. It has to start somewhere. And they seem quite responsive to making it work with other things. James Harton is plugging away at getting it working with Nerves (https://nerves-project.org) and he has it running with Buildroot already. Current repo: https://github.com/jimsynz/buildroot
Most recently they pushed their special sauce for the bootloader and how to produce the relevant mystery binaries. https://forum.arduino.cc/t/buildroot-support-for-uno-q/14108...
I share the sentiment that I don't trust that there won't be issues with Qualcomm over time. That company does have some pretty relevant chips though so I'm hopeful this means that we see them become more accessible on SBCs and embedded boards. I feel like they've been popping up more and more.
If they value this investment in Arduino they should now have a small wing of the company that pushes for things to be more open and even if they only consider that a marketing vector, if things are opened up for that purpose, quite possibly a win. But Arduino might also be absorbed into the amorphous megablob and this is the last we see. I hope not.
I don't think this board is that weird. It is just coming from the Arduino side and moving into Raspberry Pi territory. Personally I want to run Nerves on the application processor and get some practice with Zephyr on the MCU. Seems to already be supported: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arduino/uno_q/d...
Also why no mention of the LED matrix. This is something RPi devices fail at. Providing som default way of neat output. First time plugging this in it starts doing fun stuff.
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I remember back when Nvidia was aiming to aquire ARM, there was a whole thread of discourse that I think even Huang himself had spoken to, about how the acquisition would transform Nvidia, would remake who they are and what they do. ARM themselves have rarely been an exemplary citizen, with driver support for their GPUs for example having only gotten respectable in the past couple years. But ARM was still a multi-lareral company. It would have been a different NV: Nvidia as head of an ecosystem, a steward for many, versus what Nvidia has been, Nvidia as a moat keeper with only their bespoke Linux4Tegra (L4T) for example. That was going to be the big change.
Qualcomm certainly seems to be saying that they want to be a different company. That they want market-share among people building products. The example elsewhere of the e-scooters using RPi's seems like the market space Qualcomm is striving to open up.
Your middle paragraphs capture a lot of the sentiment. Qualcomm is a hard company to trust. There have been a lot of neat weird interesting things that have gotten mainlined, and it's cool to see, but most products are incredibly hard to develop for, push you into vendor Board Support Packages, and don't have docs available. This chip similarly lacks technical docs.
But it sure is exciting to think maybe Qualcomm might actually want embedded market share beyond the high end of phones, routers, and laptops. And if they do want this market share, they're going to have to change.
Modern Qualcomm SoCs have "RPM" - a dedicated always-on ARM core for managing clocks, sleep modes and power states. And usually at least one low power DSP core that can be up when the rest of the system is down.
Good luck getting your hands on any docs on how to use any of that shit tho.