[fedora-arm] Nexus 7

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> On 07/03/2012 03:32 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Richard W.M. Jones<rjones at redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I know we don't support tablets.  That's been pretty comprehensively
>>> covered on the list already, eg:
>>>
>>> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-April/003107.html
>>
>>
>> Actually that doesn't state we don't comprehensively want to support
>> tablets, it states at the moment it's hard to support tablets. I would
>> love to be able to support tablets and the touch stuff is improving
>> all the time, like with F-17 we actually now have the underlying
>> support for multitouch, now if only we had some even half decent X
>> drivers we'd be well on the way there. There's even people working on
>> the gnome touch stuff on ARM so it should improve even more in the
>> F-18 cycle!
>>
>>> But!  Suddenly a tablet appears which is both much cheaper and (in
>>> some respects) far more powerful than the Trim Slices and BeagleBoards
>>> that we do support.
>>>
>>> Is it possible to support Tegra2/3 tablets, at least in a headless
>>> configuration until there are graphics drivers?
>>
>>
>> It's possible if the relevant kernel code is upstream. I've got one on
>> order with the intention of looking at what would be required to make
>> it work and to hack around with it. With 3.4 the beginnings of the
>> tegra30 support started to appear. I'm hoping google is a lot better
>> at pushing it upstream than say Toshiba with the AC100.
>
>
> This is another part that is really perverse - it shouldn't be
> Google/Toshiba pushing Tegra support upstream, it should be Nvidia.

No, that's not correct. Nvidia is quite good at getting the core tegra
SoC bits upstream as can be seen in the kernels with the tegra30
support. But each manufacturer wires up each device differently and
then adds a whole raft of other stuff from compasses to wifi to sound
chips and even connects them to different pins on the SoC depending on
their board layout or the direction of the wind and it's this that is
the problem and it is asus/toshiba/google's job to get that upstream
because the SoC manufacturer has no idea how each company using their
SoCs does this.

Peter