Samsung Chromebook Plus & aarch64 vs. 88W8897

This is for ARMv8 based devices

Samsung Chromebook Plus & aarch64 vs. 88W8897

Postby docwebhead » Wed Mar 29, 2017 4:31 pm

I realize I'm sticking my head into the upper atmosphere here, but I'm pretty happy with the performance of Alarm on this beauty. No hardware-accelerated GUI, but Cinnamon2d does well enough, and sees the touchpad & touchscreen -- even has a HiDPi knob!

My only real problem is that the Marvell wifi chipset, the fency-schmency Marvell Avastar 88W8897, is using some kind of crazy MIMO magick under Chrome OS to get pretty good reception even though the CB+ has a magnesium frame and aluminum alloy body.

Alarm doesn't know these spells, and gets pretty basic, flaky connections. Reading about the Avastar 88W8897 on the manufacturer's website makes it all sound fairly esoteric, but I can't believe there's no way to improve the way it works under Alarm.

My background is in Red Hat and embedded Debianish stuff, so any advice specific to the Arm way of doing things, or just general pointers would be much appreciated. And this is my first post here, so feel free to call me an idiot if I'm being one (though I did search before posting).

Here's the spec sheet from Marvell (warning, PDF):
http://www.marvell.com/wireless/avastar ... SoC-PB.pdf
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Re: Samsung Chromebook Plus & aarch64 vs. 88W8897

Postby docwebhead » Fri Apr 07, 2017 8:59 pm

Just in case, for the lurkers: Recent updates have improved wifi reception considerably, it is now almost as strong in Arch ARM as in Chrome OS.

Still no hardware acceleration for the Mali T860MP4 GPU, but otherwise it's amazingly well supported.
Kudos to the ALARM gurus!
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