1.
Open Hardware GNU/LinuxOpen Hardware GNU/Linux
PPC64 Laptop PotentialPPC64 Laptop Potential
Roberto Innocenti, Power Progress Community - Associate & Academic Member
In collaboration with
OpenPOWER Academic and Research

2.
Brief history
powerpc-notebook.org first publishedpowerpc-notebook.org first published
List of hardware requirementsList of hardware requirements
Becomes Open Source HardwareBecomes Open Source Hardware
Established PowerProgressCommunity associationEstablished PowerProgressCommunity association
20142014
Donation campaign for Electrical SchematicsDonation campaign for Electrical Schematics
20152015
20162016
20172017
2017-20182017-2018
Donation campaign for Printed Circuit Board designDonation campaign for Printed Circuit Board design2019-20202019-2020
Donation campaign for Fast SI bus simulationsDonation campaign for Fast SI bus simulations20202020

3.
Power Progress Community
founders and some of the
core team members

4.
Power Progress
Community founders
and the core team

5.
Our goals
Design Open Hardware, with prototypes, accessible to
the widest range of people.
Facilitate the re-use of dismissed or low-cost hardware
by means of open source software.
Encourage people to use open source software.
Help and promote innovation and scientific progress
supporting multiplicity and variety in order to avoid
- or at least reduce - monopolies.

6.
Who make the Printed Circuit Board design?
●
The association counts around 50 volunteers, but
only very few are able to review the electronic
design.
●
Volunteer capable of reviewing the design lacks
spare time for this -unpaid- activity.
●
We solve the situation by setting up “donation
campaigns” that allows us to indirectly hire
professional electronic designers:
PPC Association > Campaign > ACube Systems
> Subcontractors

7.
Everyone can examine, alter, build, distribute or sell anything
(either the circuits design and/or hardware based on it).
●
Open Source Hardware Certification
https://certification.oshwa.org/
●
Certification allows for some components non
100% Open Source Hardware as vendors may
force NDAs
Open Source Hardware is Essential

8.
Our Open Source Hardware Path
Goal: Oshwa Certification - https://certification.oshwa.org/
Steps
●
Support from the NYU Technology Law and Policy Clinic
to make the project as Open Hardware as possible.
●
Contacts with Chip manufacturers for authorizations
to distribute the finalized project as Open Hardware
●
Publication of the electrical schematic (Orcad source)
with the Open Hardware CERN license v1.2

9.
PPC64 Processor for Laptop or Little Endian?
When we searched a PPC 64 bit CPU for a laptop back in 2014,
we identified the Freescale T2080 as a good candidate because of
its reasonable cost, good performance and low power consumption.
With the NXP acquisition of Freescale, the evolution of PowerPC
CPUs stopped and ARM become the priority.
We are stuck with PowerPC CPUs that properly work in Big
Endian mode only, as Altivec does not work in Little Endian mode.
At the same time, most Linux distros supporting the Power
Architecture became switching from Big Endian to Little
Endian, as porting software from x86 is much easier.

10.
It’s born before the Big Endian software or hardware?
●
Producing today a consumer motherboard
with a Big Endian (BE) CPU is hazardous,
as Linux distros with an official support for
PPC64 BE are lacking.
●
Maintaining PPC64 Big Endian software is
time consuming because of two factors:
difficult to solve endianess issues while
porting and lack of accessible hardware

11.
Laptop specifications
CPU: NXP T2080, e6500 64-bit Power Architecture with Altivec technology
4 x e6500 dual-threaded cores, low-latency backside 2MB L2 cache, 16GFLOPS x core
RAM: 2 x RAM slots for DDR3L SO-DIMM
VIDEO: MXM 3 mobile video card interface
AUDIO: cmedia sound chip, audio in and audio out jacks
USB: 3.0 and 2.0 ports
STORAGE:
NVM Express (NVMe), M.2 2280 connector
2 x SATA
1 x SDHC card reader
NETWORK:
1 x ethernet RJ-45 connector
WiFi connectivity
Bluetooth connectivity
POWER: on-board battery charger and power-management
CHASSIS: Slimbook Eclipse notebook case 15,6”

12.
Manufacturer Authorizations
C-Media
●
CM8828 HD-Audio controllers and
CM9882A codec family
●
They sent an evaluation badge to Acube.
●
They assure the availability of the chips for
the project.
NXP
●
Have authorized the publication of
information in Open Source documents

13.
Other Chip Vendors
There are already other Open
Hardware mobo that use Marvell
http://wiki.macchiatobin.net/tiki-index.php?page=S
chematics
http://espressobin.net/tech-spec/
For AMD there are no problems to publish schemas
and PCB open hardware, considering that we do not
have the AMD Radeon chip in our mobo but on a
separate MXM card produced by AMD

14.
●
Creating a brand new notebook chassis
from scratch in small numbers was not
financially feasible.
●
Find a supplier that provide us few
hundreds of notebook body without the
motherboard was very difficult.
●
After a couple of years (!) we finally found a
viable solution thanks to the Slimbook
support.
●
We are now designing a PowerPC
motherboard targeting the Slimbook
“Eclipse” chassis.
It’s born before the Laptop Chassis or the motherboard?
PowerPC

15.
Collaboration PPC ↔ Slimbook ↔ ACube
Slimbook has sent
information about parts of the
laptop

The schematics have been
adapted for this chassis

The PCB is designed to fit
in the Slimbook Body

16.
Slimbook Eclipse body
Gaming Oriented
Allows us to use MXM
graphics
The body of the laptop is
actually the entire case, the
cooling system, the screen, the
keyboard, the backlight, the
webcam, the speakers and the
battery.

17.
PowerPC
Open
Hardware
PCB
Design
Mother
board
production
ACube
Systems
Slimbook Eclipse body
from PCB Design to Laptop production

18.
1 Electrical schematics
€ 12.600
2 PCB Printed Circuit Board
12 October 2019 - 8 September 2020
€ 19.000
3 Fast SI bus simulations
9 September 2020
€ 5.000
3 5 prototypes € 10.500
4 Hardware Tests € 14.000
5 CE Certification € 12.500
2 July 2017 - 7 June 2018
Donation campaigns plan

19.
Why donation campaigns ?
● We could not make use of commercial crowdfunding platforms:
- they support the production of a product
- they require a working prototype at the end
● We are not making or selling any physical product.
● We are doing and supporting research and development.
● To achieve this, we must fund the engineering design process.

20.
Our DNA
●
The association is run by hobbyists that work for fun on the project on their
spare time, no one is getting paid, only the funded electronic engineers
●
We have a very flexible business plan, no tight time-to-market strategy
●
We can afford to run a donations campaign for an unlimited amount of
time, and that is not allowed by any crowdfunding platform.

21.
What if a phase fails?

Donors will decide on which other project of the
association divert the collected funds.

Donations are free and non refundable (Italian law)

Other projects of the associations are:

Debian ppc64 packages patches and fixes

Open Source Laptop Chassis Design

“Revivo with Scratch”, re-use of dismissed computers
for schools

As the activities of the association is decided by its
members, a potential donor might want to join Power
Progress Community by paying the yearly membership fee
(30€).

22.
Open Source code should be truly CPU agnostic
We commonly encounter open source software tight to Little
Endian CPUs nd that cannot be compiled on Big Endian
CPUs.
When a library or a framework cannot be compiled, it causes
troubles to all software depending on it, and that compromise
the usability of the entire system.
Our volunteers works to fix endianess issues to source
codes, but it’s a huge task for a very few people: we need
help!
We are trying to concentrate on those packages and libraries
that solve the dependencies to a multitude of others
packages.

23.
Support to Debian PPC64
Debian Repository is available
Goal: porting software to PPC64 Big Endian with Altivec/VMX
The list contains key software:
●
Firefox, mplayer, Linux Kernel, table...
●
11 groups, 546 packages, total repository size 1943.37MB (1.9GB)
●
Built using two Power8/9 instancies in OpenStack hosted thanks to the
Oregon State University Open Source Lab and the
OpenPower Foundation

24.

Optimize graphic cards detection

Patch sources/package for Big Endian compatibility
●
Freedesktop-sdk, flatpack, Mesa
●
Docker , etc...

Compile, configure and test the latest Linux Kernels

Organize and publish our patches

Let’s collaborate with Debian PPC64 Big Endian

Let’s collaborate with MintPPC 64

Let’s collaborate with VoidLinux PPC64
Improve GNU/Linux PPC64 applications

25.
Future Plans
●
Reach the goals of the Donation Campaigns phases
●
Involve additional volunteers, especially hardware expert and
anyone able to fix endianess issues
●
Support forks of our design to the newer Power Architecture
processors based on the OpenPower Open ISA
- Libre-SOC cpu/gpu
- A2I POWER Processor Core
●
In-source new Hardware designs with Open Hardware
engineers
●
Seminars in Tech High Schools and Universities to
encourage study and improvement on our Open Hardware
designs and Power Open ISA CPU/GPU

26.
Join Open our Hardware team
Open Source
Laptop Chassis Designs
FreeCad/Blender 3D chassis design
Open Hardware Designs
PCB review, PCB/Schematic forks

27.
Join us with Your Creativity on

Creation of multimedia design to advertise (video,
animations, images, articles, etc…).

Translations of the websites, social networks and
software

Spreading the project on blogs, forums, socials

Law Assistance to support the Open Source Hardware
License

Maintain, update, manage our software tools and
services

Outreach, seminars in High Schools and Universities

28.
Thank you!
and now QA
www.powerpc-notebook.org
In collaboration with
OpenPOWER Academic and Research