December 12, 2023, 01:13:48 AM

Any progress since 2018?

Started by khumarahn, November 14, 2023, 04:22:59 PM

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khumarahn

Hi! I have a Teres, but I haven't been using it for perhaps 5 years. I love the idea of the repairable and sustainable laptop, but I stopped using it for 2 main reasons:
* with the mainline kernel, power management and suspend didn't work, battery life sucked big way,
* it was slow, not only in a browser, but even for very basic work, like vim with a latex plugin.

Has anything changed? If I understand correctly, the plans for a new motherboard are in a perpetual limbo. But what about the power management?

LubOlimex

Suspend still doesn't work and graphics hardware acceleration drivers are at the same state. Binary blobs can probably be used but require knowledge and break the open source nature of the project.
Technical support and documentation manager at Olimex

khumarahn

ok, thank you.

Has there been any progress on battery life? Switching from 3.* kernel to mainline decreased battery life very strongly

kreyren

Quote from: LubOlimex on November 15, 2023, 09:21:32 AMSuspend still doesn't work and graphics hardware acceleration drivers are at the same state. Binary blobs can probably be used but require knowledge and break the open source nature of the project.

bullshiiiet! suspend works, CPUIdle implemented in Crust since https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust/commit/588aef2a0f687fd84b8c7c37402c6006b6c1cc7f and Crust version 0.6 (https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust/issues/211)

Just make sure that you have SWAP or IT WILL NOT WORK! at the size of your DRAM + reasonable tolerance e.g. 1 GB

That said i recommend setting suspend-then-hibernate as CPUIdle will disable all but one core and underclocks it which gives teres like 12h of suspend time before it drains the battery and turns off where with hibernation it suspend and after X seconds it will hibernate which will last until you open it again and gets in system under 1 sec on my end.


"and graphics hardware acceleration drivers are at the same state"

bullshiiiiet! Mesa works great just be aware of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/8198 and that you need https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/commit/c426e5677f36c3b0b8e8ea199ed4f2c7fad06d47 patch otherwise Asahi Lina and her macbook von Asahi Linux will haunt your system with `DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB failed: Cannot allocate memory` most of distributions already seem to have implemented patches, but NixOS currently very broken due to their internal policies which should be resolved next week.

"Binary blobs can probably be used but require knowledge and break the open source nature of the project."

Fuck blobs! We run without these 100% FOSS no blobs needed. run linux-libre it works great!

Quote from: khumarahn on November 14, 2023, 04:22:59 PM* with the mainline kernel, power management and suspend didn't work, battery life sucked big way,

Let me know if the battery life sucks on new release e.g. https://www.armbian.com/olimex-teres-a64 it seems to last at least 3 days on my non-heavy usage, but looking for motivations to fry the AXP803s to see what battery we can upgrade it to optionally join my club of annoying tsvetan about advice about this~

Quote from: khumarahn on November 14, 2023, 04:22:59 PM* it was slow, not only in a browser, but even for very basic work, like vim with a latex plugin.

Loading is slow, i recommend using 128GB MicroSD XC I sdcard to get that somewhat more reasonable as the emmc is slow trash optionally look at https://www.olimex.com/forum/index.php?topic=9095.0 the powerpins on teres's mainboard are weak, but datasheet seems to indicate that the chip would work anyway, again club of annoying tsvetan with questions about teres, it's great we don't have membership fees.

Quote from: khumarahn on November 16, 2023, 01:39:08 PMok, thank you.

Has there been any progress on battery life? Switching from 3.* kernel to mainline decreased battery life very strongly

Provide details i try to investigate it :p

---

Beyond that the development is ongoing currently mostly by Debian (jc and his team), Alpine (moslty mps), Parabola (multiple people), Armbian devs(yours truly + sunxi nerds).. Mps even has a cool optimized kernel config that makes teres more responsive which i plan on submitting to upstream linux as defconfig once i do more experiments.

but feel free to ask questions :p
* Maintainer of OLIMEX Teres-A64 on Armbian and NixOS
* Co-Author of an Official OLIMEX Teres-A64 support for Parabola GNU/Linux
* Author of an Official OLIMEX Teres-A64 support for GNU Guix
* World record holder in annoying Tsvetan with questions about OLIMEX Teres-A64 hacking