Cubox

[pepedog]

http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox
Looks interesting?

[kmihelich]

Saw that today too, has me interested. Maybe when I have some disposable income and do some more research on the Armada and the status of drivers for graphics and whatnot. It's made my wishlist, but right now the Origen board is above it.

[crimsonredmk]

Unbrickable, eh? I wonder how many people will brick it even after we post clear copy-paste instructions...

[rabeeh]

Unbrickable, eh? I wonder how many people will brick it even after we post clear copy-paste instructions...

Unbrickable by it's design, since you can always bypass booting from u-boot by booting from a firmware inside the chip (ROM), that can never be overwritten by the user.
Using this method you even don't need a JTAG to recover anything, just click a button from the back of the box when powered up and it will boot from serial port.
In CuBox case there is even an internal USB to serial controller ( very hacker friendly ) that the recovery mechanism can boot from.

[pepedog]

The CTO himself.
Are kernel sources available? And cat /proc/cpuinfo
Thank you

[rabeeh]

Kernel sources are available, we will release all sources (kernel and others).
I'll send a cat /proc/cpuinfo tomorrow (now at home).
Basically it's a dual issue dynamic stage pipeline processor at 800MHz with ARMv7 instruction set with VFPv3-d16 hardware floating point unit, with 512KB L2 cache.

Being a dual issue machine, it can execute up to two instructions per cycle (depending on pipeline bubbles etc...)

You can compare it with other processors, like the Kirkwood SoC that has a is a single issue, fixed stage pipeline, and no floating point unit processor

[kmihelich]

That should work well with our ARMv7 port, which is built hard-float vfpv3-d16. The capabilities of the device that I've seen just from browsing over the tech specs on Marvell's site have me pretty impressed. I haven't found much regarding the GPU that's built in, do you have any pointers to documentation or know if there is source code for Xorg/framebuffer drivers? A recurring theme in the devices we support with HDMI is having to deal with binary blobs from the vendor.

I read that there is only going to be a limited production to start off with. Do you expect to have units available at the beginning of January? That would be my ideal time frame to order and get official support rolling for the device.

Also, thanks for finding us and answering questions, it's really appreciated.

[WarheadsSE]

rabeeh,

We were discussing the device among our developers, and we realized that since we have no comapartive model, we aren't sure we'll be able to immediately support this device on or v7 hardfloat system, as it is targeted at armv7-a series cpus (Cortex-a). Until we manage to get a batch into the hands of our developers, it may be DOA for Arch Linux ARM until we can get that sorted out.

[kmihelich]

We should be good for v7h since we don't exactly use many of the Cortex-A series features that are enabled through the compiler, since supporting the Tegra2 means not using fun stuff like NEON in the main repo. Also looks like we should be good using the mainline kernel, as the 88AP510 processor being used is supported (under Marvell Dove). At most, kernel-wise, we'd need to write a board file if things don't match up to the Marvell or CompuLab implementations of the processor. Not a difficult task. But, of course, just speculation until I have one on my desk.

[Ale90bz]

Hi!
I think that this link can be useful to port archlinux arm on Cubox.
http://www.solid-run.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4

sorry for my poor english