Availability of the am3352 SOM?

[jmyreen]

Any word on when this product will be available? You showed prototypes of the board in July 2013, that's a year ago. In May this year you announced that it will be for sale by the end of the month. Yet it is still "out of stock". In the mean time new Allwinner based products are announced almost weekly.

The Sitara processors have some advantages over the Allwinner SOCs, for one thing, they are vastly better documented.

[olimex]

Linux support for Sitara is total MESS

if you want to add board != of BBB the chances things to work are close to zero

you enable the LCD and your Ethernet stop working for example or other weird stuff happend

perhaps we are dumb, but the major problem is that nobody helps you if you choose Sitara to work with

we posted several times questions on BeagleBoard forum without reply, and we are not alone you can count how many people there ask for help for boards they made with Sitara with same result - nobody helps them

Robert Nelson who is taking care for BB Linux support now do not respond to our e-mails anymore (used to reply before when he was not so involved with BB)

So we will keep trying to make Linux support for AM3352, but we don't know when this will be complete
...and we have plenty of more interesting stuff to do, at least Allwinner have strong Linux-Sunxi community not locked with strings to particular board/vendor and you can communicate and get help to your (most of the times maybe silly) questions

[jmyreen]

Linux support for Sitara is total MESS
[...] but the major problem is that nobody helps you if you choose Sitara to work with

Sorry to hear you are having problems with the software.
It's a bit hard to help if the hardware is not available.

[jlucius]

Linux support for Sitara is total MESS

if you want to add board != of BBB the chances things to work are close to zero

you enable the LCD and your Ethernet stop working for example or other weird stuff happend

perhaps we are dumb, but the major problem is that nobody helps you if you choose Sitara to work with

we posted several times questions on BeagleBoard forum without reply, and we are not alone you can count how many people there ask for help for boards they made with Sitara with same result - nobody helps them

Robert Nelson who is taking care for BB Linux support now do not respond to our e-mails anymore (used to reply before when he was not so involved with BB)

So we will keep trying to make Linux support for AM3352, but we don't know when this will be complete
...and we have plenty of more interesting stuff to do, at least Allwinner have strong Linux-Sunxi community not locked with strings to particular board/vendor and you can communicate and get help to your (most of the times maybe silly) questions

I have not worked with a TI board yet, but from what I can see all main drivers for TI are in mainline linux and TI does a lot of work keeping their stuff in mainline, which is great and which is why I was hoping to get a am3352 SOM soon to try and work with it.

Sunxi has a great community, but they just started to mainline all drivers, which will probably still take month till most parts are supported. So long everybody is stuck with a 3.4 kernel.

There are a few other vendors out there with Sitara SOMs so it should be doable.
Are the problems hardware or software related?
I am sure there are people out there who can help with this stuff. As all parts should be mainline isn´t the most hard part defining a new device tree file and the rest should work (at least in theory)?

As you have a community here as well maybe some people who are interested could help with this stuff?

[JohnS]

It may be possible to ask for volunteers who provide details of their expertise to qualify for free boards.  Or some such.

(Offhand, BB appear to be competitors so I don't get why they would help.)

John

[olimex]

BB probably make no money from their project, well Circuit Co may take their share for the assembly but Jason Krinder probably gets just patting on his back from the TI managment, they exist to promote TI Sitara chips

this is not new with TI, many other TI development boards are with same business model like the $4.30 MSP430 Launchpad etc

all BB massive advertising campains are backed by TI machine and lot of $$$ is put in this project which will probably never return back

so it's hard to call BB competitor, as AM3352-SOM will do the same - promote Sitara chips use and sales

my observations so far is that TI do not care to develop wider Open Source community around Sitara and they will suffer in long term from this decission.

Allwinner community is bigger, people more easily start their projects around Allwinner chips (Olimex have it's humble share in this with the OSHW designs) you can always get help on linux-sunxi mailing list no matter if you do something with development board, TV android stick or tablet on which you want to run Linux

[olimex]

I have not worked with a TI board yet, but from what I can see all main drivers for TI are in mainline linux and TI does a lot of work keeping their stuff in mainline, which is great and which is why I was hoping to get a am3352 SOM soon to try and work with it.

Sunxi has a great community, but they just started to mainline all drivers, which will probably still take month till most parts are supported. So long everybody is stuck with a 3.4 kernel.

There are a few other vendors out there with Sitara SOMs so it should be doable.
Are the problems hardware or software related?
I am sure there are people out there who can help with this stuff. As all parts should be mainline isn´t the most hard part defining a new device tree file and the rest should work (at least in theory)?

As you have a community here as well maybe some people who are interested could help with this stuff?

mainline? imx233 is also in "mainline" but many things do not work correctly and nobody cares to fix them for more than year, same is with am3352 in mainline is the configuration for BB and nothing else, try to enable two Ethernets for instance

Sunxi is stuck at 3.4 due to the decission of Allwinner to not use device tree but their own FEX this means every time they release something Sunxi community have to duplicate their work which is lot of work and silly in long term, now when Allwinner is part of Linaro things must change and they should leave FEX (which is not bad IMO )

it's hard to say if something is pure hardware or software problem when it doesn't work

[JohnS]

I suppose any chip-maker doesn't really care as long as millions are being sold.  AW are doing very well on that metric.  TI I suspect are doing relatively poorly.  That would make some firms work to overcome the roadblocks (such as lack of working software).

The chip makers who fail to assist with software can expect a very tough financial environment.  If that is TI, well it's their choice.

I'd like to see stronger competition for AW from other chip makers, but it's up to the chip makers.

John

[jlucius]

mainline? imx233 is also in "mainline" but many things do not work correctly and nobody cares to fix them for more than year, same is with am3352 in mainline is the configuration for BB and nothing else, try to enable two Ethernets for instance

it's hard to say if something is pure hardware or software problem when it doesn't work

OK mainline may not be error free, but at least I don´t have to deceide either to not have some functions with a 3.1x kernel or backport needed functions to 3.4. But as I said there is great work beeing done at sunxi community and it´s getting better every day.

I am no hardware guy so this might be naive, but are there no TI field engineers giving support to you, I suppose Olimex is big enough to qualify for support?

[jlucius]

I suppose any chip-maker doesn't really care as long as millions are being sold.  AW are doing very well on that metric.  TI I suspect are doing relatively poorly.  That would make some firms work to overcome the roadblocks (such as lack of working software).

Thats probably why TI dumped their mobile business?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/25/texasinstruments-wireless-idUSL1E8KP5FN20120925?irpc=932

What other chip vendors are there (for chips that can be bought and used by companies like olimex AND have some kind of Linux support)?

Guess that only leaves the three known vendors? Freescale, TI, AW ?

What about Nvidia, Samsung, Broadcom?

Rockchip?

Mediatek violating GPL because they don´t release source code?

Seems there are not many options.

[Madjidlho]

There are also atmel ones, good linux support. Or the 'ew freescale one, which are much more aimed for industrial application. And they rock (imx6)

[JohnS]

Snag is Atmel quite often seem to make orphans of their chips and various people have complained about Freescale in other ways.  Different problems than AW but no-one seems well behaved!

John

[olimex]

Freescale do not do it better than TI http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=69&doc_id=1286785
they closed their research center in Israel last year and left the imx7 development

[farlane]

Seems that according to you TI and Freescale are making a mess of their support and Allwinner is the only decent option around, although there are multiple examples around for successful designs that use Freescale and TI chips on their modules/boards.

Maybe it's time for a reality check?

[JohnS]

Please say which are the successful ones.

John