Hi everybody, last week had two important new developments in Taipei: 1. Samsung 6410 2. Marvell 8688
We decided to start working on a new hardware design using the Samsung 6410 SoC. Samsung's documentation is unfortunately closed, which puts them at a disadvantage compared to TI or Freescale, for example. However, they are releasing a Linux driver set which we will forward- port to the latest mainline Linux kernel and make more mainline compatible. Also, we will use our very supportive contacts at Samsung to see whether we can convince them to open up their documentation. Staying with Samsung allows us to reuse more of our current Linux driver work, for example the PMU (NXP 50633) can stay the same. Similar with Marvell - we decided to seriously evaluate Marvell's Wi- Fi and Bluetooth chips, specifically the Marvel 8688. As with Samsung, documentation is currently closed, but we got high-level support at Marvell telling us they are actively working on opening up their documentation, and GPL drivers are available from Marvell or already in the mainline. Our work with Atheros will continue, we want to remove several abstraction layers from the driver Atheros released, or switch to the mainline driver right away. We will also evaluate Atheros' 6002 chip and are very satisfied with the engineering support we get from Atheros. Some big Openmoko fans over there :-) The reason we want to work with both Atheros and Marvell is that we have so many plans around Wi-Fi that we cannot afford to not consider both options. In the long run we are even thinking (well, it's more 'dreaming') about designing our own Wi-Fi baseband chip, but give us a few years for that... I want to add a disclaimer here: What I am talking about are engineering activities. They may or may not translate into products, whichever products. Speculating about GTA03, GTA04 or some totally different acronyms won't help and I won't participate. A 'design and development' process is naturally full of surprises, and marketing has the upper hand still when it comes to products. Any product we are making, we want to be the best in kernel.org (and other upstream) compatibility. Ideally 100% of the product's features should be available through the mainline. That's our goal, for existing and future products. Best Regards, Wolfgang _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
