During Linaro Connect 2015 Asia there was announcement about new Linaro project called “96boards”. It is about making cheap ARM/AArch64 boards in same form factor and same placement of ports. And first board named HiKey was presented. Today third one — from Qualcomm. So we have two boards now (2/96 was not yet announced).

I prefer not to comment on form factor, lack of Ethernet, mobile phone cpus and other things people do not like but about software requirements.

96boards specification v1.0 says:

Minimum Software requirements for 96Boards certification will include: Boot architecture (open source implementations are strongly recommended)

Support for bootloader such as U-Boot/ FDT , UEFI / ACPI , UEFI / FDT

, / , / Support for a secure execution environment (optional)

Support for ARM Trusted Firmware (ARMv8), including PSCI APIs (optional)

Trusted Firmware (ARMv8), including APIs (optional) Accelerated graphics support

Accelerated graphics drivers need to be fully supported either with open source code, or through royalty free binary drivers. If binary drivers are utilized, the vendor will provide support to provide updated drivers/libraries to support new mainline Linux kernel features.

Kernel

A kernel based on one of the following that is buildable from source code and any required binary blobs:

kernel.org latest “mainline” or “stable” kernel

The latest Google-supported Android kernel version

One of the last two kernel.org LTS kernels (for example Linaro LSK )

kernels (for example Linaro ) Operating system

The latest released (stable) version of one or more of the following open source distributions shall be made available for a 96Boards CE compliant design:

compliant design: Android

Debian or Ubuntu

Fedora or Red Hat

An OpenEmbedded/Yocto build of a Linux distribution

I hoped that Linaro will be a place where free/open source software would matter. But it looks like “let release whatever you want as long as size and ports match” deal. Any blob as bootloader, binary graphics drivers (does someone remember TI OMAP line and PowerVR? Those boards run with raw framebuffer nowadays).

And that kernel requirement… HiKey uses cpu which is not in mainline kernel, so does Qualcomm one. Are they in AOSP kernel? Maybe. But does someone else than Android uses those trees for serious work? Latest I see in kernel-msm (which may not be proper place to check) is 3.10 which was released (in mainline) nearly 2 years ago…

I really wonder how “latest released (stable) version” of Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu can be made available for those boards when all those distributions use mainline kernel only (I do not count user generated remixes which are not supported by anyone).

So I wonder will 96/96 board came with mainline support, open bootloader and open drivers for everything. Time will show. Until that I am not so interested.