Thursday, December 14, 2023

[fedora-arm] Re: State of the mibility SIG, dec 2023

One other thing I had meant to bring up to mobility meetings, which I
had been missing which I think I now realise is probably because they
moved to matrix.

Is handheld gaming consoles a possible focus or interest for mobility SIG?

I've seen a bunch of devices, in particular the Anbernic RGXX3 ones,
landing upstream so it's possible they could be a much easier target
but TBH I have not looked extremely closely here.

https://anbernic.com/collections/handheld-game-console

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 8:47 AM Peter Robinson <pbrobinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Kevin,
>
> Thanks for the update. Comments inline.
>
> Firstly I'd like to apologise for my lack of public participation in
> the SIG, the last year or two has proven quite problematic for me
> personally, I've had a lot of "higher priorities" which has reduced my
> available hacking time, and that seems to quickly get gobbled up with
> things like RPi regressions and release blocker bugs. Throw in a whole
> bunch of mental health issues and something had to give.
>
> That being said, in the last few weeks I have been actually back to
> some hacking projects... more on that below.
>
> > This will be a bit long, but I hope it will explain the current unfortunate state
> > of the mobility sig.
> >
> > First a bit of history. The mobility sig was originally formed back in 2010.
> > The goal then was "… a group of Fedora contributors that are interested in
> > Fedora on small devices. Initially aimed at supporting NetBooks, Mobile Internet devices"
> > A good deal of progress on small devices like netbooks and tablets was made,
> > but then the members of the SIG moved on to other concerns. Then, in 2020 the
> > most recent version of the SIG formed. The goal was focused on getting Fedora
> > working well on the new pine64 pinephone, and then later when announced the new
> > pine64 pinephone pro.
> >
> > In the last 3 years we have accomplished a lot:
> >
> > The phosh stack has been packaged up
> > We have been producing Fedora Remixes with 3rd party kernels to provide support
> > for pinephone and pinephone pro.
> > a Phosh spin has been created and officially produced
> > There was a effort to get a remix working for the oneplus 6, but
> > still requiring a lot of manual tweaking.
> >
> > Unfortunately, the active members of the sig are not able to move things forward right now.
> > The pinephone and pinephone pro are both old devices at this point. They were slow
> > when released, and thats not improved. Worse, upstreaming of patches to get either
> > of them working with a Fedora/Mainline kernel seems unlikely to us for a lot
> > of reasons, including that many of the 3rd party patches aren't in a state that
> > upstream would accept and many authors of them have no particular desire to
> > upstream them.
> >
> > The phosh spin is largely not useful in the current situation as the
> > Fedora mainline kernel barely boots on the pinephone pro (not at all on the
> > pinephone) and has no wireless or display. The image could be of use to
> > other aarch64 single board style devices, but since they usually don't have
> > displays or modems, the phosh interface isn't of particular insterest.
>
> So I have been booting the original Pinephone on Fedora 39, display
> works so I'd be interested in the issues you're seeing there. I'm
> booting the original PP because of the Wireless, I've been looking at
> some of the realtek modules for another project but hoping the side
> effect is actually the rtl8723 series devices should be upstream
> soon(ish). This should also resolve the issue on the original PineTab
> although I don't remember who has that as I don't (the people that do
> please reach out if you want to help testing).
>
> The PPP is also on my list to look at again soon, initially it'll be
> around U-Boot due to the F-39 blocker issues as I'm working to resolve
> that upstream for once so I'll be testing that on my PPP, I thought we
> had the wireless and screen there, I do need to circle back more to
> this one though TBH.
>
> > Until the advent of some performant mobile device to target or more
> > contributors who wish to drive things forward, I think we should just
> > mark the Mobility sig inactive at this point, including:
>
> I think marking the SIG as inactive probably makes sense.
>
> > Retire the Phosh spin in f40
>
> What's currently produced here?
>
> > Hopefully find new maintainers for the phosh stack if there's folks that want to keep them alive.
>
> How much work is this? How many packages?
>
> > Mark the sig inactive on wiki and matrix.
>
> Just as I actually get the energy to setup matrix :-P although I am
> yet to find the SIG there
>
> > respins will move to against a stable fedora release once a week or so, instead of against rawhide and more often.
>
> What's in the respins? Is that basically Fedora and custom kernel?
>
> > Hopefully there is someday a brighter day for Fedora mobile devices.
> > Folks that want to try and revive the SIG and/or are able to see a good
> > path forward are invited to join #mobility:fedoraproject.org.
>
> Peter
--
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