Re: device tree not the answer in the ARM world [was: Re: running Debian on a Cubieboard]

Rob Landley
2013-05-08T03:45:07Z

On 05/06/2013 03:55:11 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 9:01 PM, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote:
> > You realize that nobody except Samsung and Apple is currently
> making money
> > in the smartphone space, right?
>
> ok, ok - substitute "tablet" or "laptop" or "media centre" for
> "smartphone" . actually it doesn't matter what the product is, really.
> the economics are the same: by the time you get to over 100 million
> units, the software development costs are somewhere around the 4th
> decimal place.

Actually it does. (That was the whole point of the video I posted a
link to.)

mainframe -> minicomputer -> microcomputer -> smartphone

We've seen this dance before. The new thing will coalesce into a
de-facto standard. (The interesting tablets are big phones, not small
PCs. The "surface" is this generation's microvax.) All gets back to
economies of scale again...

> > Yes, you can install Linux on cheap plastic pieces of nonstandard
> crap that
> > have already ceased production before you can buy one. It's about as
> > interesting as hollowing out a Furby and making it run Linux.
>
> tell me about it. now you know what drove me to come up with the
> Rhombus Tech initiative. been there, rob, and decided i didn't like
> being fucked about, and decided to do something about it.

I'm attempting to hijack android and convince it to evolve into
something usable (as I descibed in the ELC talk, starting around the 30
second mark), but day job's leaving me spread a touch thin this month...

> >> do you see the point, james? the cost of the software
> development is
> >> utterly, utterly, utterly irrelevant.
> >
> >
> > Which means that nothing we do matters to them anyway, they will
> never
> > listen to us, we have no reason to listen to them, and they can
> basically
> > piss off and stop bothering us?
>
> well, i'm listening. through some _really_ random and extremely
> lucky - very very jammy - coincidences, i have access to some very
> very large factories in china. we've been talking to them for some
> time, and because of the sheer overwhelming scales that they're
> dealing with, they reaaaaally like the advantages that 1) and 2) bring
> to them [above, right at the top of this message].
>
> mind you, it took us 18 months to explain it to them, but when we
> finally managed, they were really fired up.

Link above is the video of my speech trying to explain what I think's
coming (and how I hope to take advantage of it). Video and outline:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0
http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt

Only the first 30 seconds are about "what is toybox". The rest is _why_
is toybox, I.E. attempting to steer the PC to smartphone transition so
we have a shot at a a non-locked-down general purpose computing device.

> and this is the opportunity that i'm acting as the gateway for *you*
> - free software developers - to gain access to, to make a difference
> and finally stop having to fuck around cleaning up after the mess made
> by the pathological profit-maximising corporations who get up our
> noses year on year.

Eh, pathological short term profit-maximizing loses out long-term to
sustainable initiatives. We're not always sure what the

> > Meanwhile, we pay attention to the companies that have a future,
> and not the
> > modern gold rush iteration. (Before the smartphone we had the
> digital watch
> > boom, the calculator boom, the incomptible 8-bit microcomputer
> boom, the
> > dot-com pets.com/drkoop.com era... this is not a new thing, and
> unix has
> > lived through all of it.)
>
> i'll be sticking around and keeping an eye on the EOMA initiative for
> the next decade, see how far it gets. that kind of long-term
> commitment
>
> > Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to provide them with good tools. But
> making
> > their needs a primary design consideration when it comes to
> sustainability
> > and upgrade paths is wrong.
>
> indeed.
>
> >A company that lives or dies based on half a
> > cent in component selection is NOT worried about an upgrade path.
> It's
> > making something disposable, and the company itself is disposable.
>
> whereas the EOMA initiative is at the complete opposite end of the
> spectrum. and products based around the EOMA standards, although
> there is a cost overhead of e.g. around $6 in parts for EOMA-68, there
> is a whopping great saving of 30 to 40% to the customer when compared
> to other products *if* your end-user is prepared to swap / share CPU
> Cards between two products. if they share the CPU Card between three
> products then the saving to them is even greater.

In theory, Moore's Law says that buys you... 9 months?

(At the low end I'm never quite sure where the fixed costs come to
dominate. Moore's law was just about price/performance ratio, not about
absolute price. We haven't gone down to disposable devices because at a
certain point the battery and case cost more than the electronics...)

But as I mentioned in the video, smartphones have to be good _phones_
to tap into the billion-unit niche.

> not only that but rather than throw away an entire product just
> because a CPU Card is obsolete [to them] the end-user can either
> re-purpose the CPU Card in a slower product, or sell it on e-bay, or
> re-use it in a freedombox.... whatever they like.

A phone is a mass-produced consumer electronics device. Is "I can rip
the guts out of my DVD player and re-use it" a commercially interesting
statement?

> what they *don't* have to do is put the entire product in landfill.
>
> etc. etc. i could go on about this at some length but i've already
> done so lots of times.

Link?

> >> but the amount of time taken on software development is *not* the
> >> same as the *cost* of the software development.
> >
> >
> > And neither is the same as the quality or sustainability of the
> resulting
> > software. But if the product line will be be discontinued three
> months after
> > its introduction, who cares about being able to maintain anything?
>
> exactly. so in this case, with EOMA-68, even if a CPU has a 3 month
> lifecycle, it's a 3 month lifecycle on *only* the CPU Card (not the
> entire product range), and in that 3 months that CPU Card sold 10
> times more than if it was used in only one single-board product.
>
> so to a factory making EOMA-68 CPU Cards with that 3-month-lifecycle
> CPU, it's still worth doing, and still worth doing well.
>
> so. to summarise: have i made it clear, rob, that only by doing
> things like EOMA - which is basically about creating mandatory
> standards with device-tree in each product's EEPROM - does device-tree
> actually become *truly* useful? if not, please do say so, because
> this is really important to get the message over to people.

20 years ago all the bespoke 8-bit machines were replaced by commodity
PCs. Rather a lot of the bespoke embedded systems are going to be
replaced by repurposed smartphone packages. But a smartphone package
has to be a good phone in addition to whatever else it does, or else it
won't tap into the economies of scale of this billion-unit niche.

Everything I had to say on this topic was in the ELC talk. That was on
the _software_ side, not on the hardware side, but it might provide a
useful framework...

Rob

P.S. Well, not _everything_. I never mentioned that Apple Airport was
obviously Steve Jobs' solution to the display portion of the
"smartphone as workstation" problem, I didn't hammer very hard on LLVM
being primarily sponsored by Apple...