 I'm going to be talking about the evolution of the 9 and 6 boards ecosystem and future software enablement. Who's here familiar with the 96 boards brand name? Yeah. All right. Cool. Good to know. Yeah. So we're going to talk just a little bit about that. I'm going to offer some resources and URLs if you don't want to read more about that. But 96 boards ecosystem. Here we go. Me. My name is Robert Wolfe. Like I just said, I'm an engineer, community manager for 96 boards, which is a part of Lenaro. And for those of you who aren't familiar with Lenaro, there will be a slide here with some links as well. You can also just search for Lenaro, go to Lenaro.org. There's some more kind of just personal information about myself, university in San Diego. I flew all the way here to talk to you all for 25 minutes. So from San Diego, please I want this to be very informal. If anyone has questions, you want to interrupt me, please do so. This is hopefully a conversation. And then when I leave, which is tomorrow, you can always reach me on Twitter, Instagram, IRC, those are the three channels that I'm usually in. I'm also in the Fedora Block channel, Fedora IoT channel, I'm in several other Fedora channels, Fedora Arm channel, and I'm in a bunch of Fedora channels as well. And then my GitHub is right there as well. Come off of my email. So today's topics, I'm going to talk just a little bit about Lenaro, a little bit about 96 boards. I'm going to talk about the community, because I'm the community manager for 96 boards, kind of give you a little bit of an insight of kind of what our reach is, what we do in general, and then I will talk about or have a conversation hopefully with everyone about the future of the software enablement on our 96 boards with Fedora. So what is Lenaro in 96 boards? Lenaro was founded in 2010, and the goal is to basically reduce the redundancies and fragmentation in the ARM ecosystem around everything in the ARM ecosystem, I guess I should say. Now I want to share a small anecdote, I'm not sure who's familiar, but SoftBank did recently acquire ARM for 32 billion dollars. The CEO must have seen something big, right, to spend that much money on ARM, 32 billion. So currently you have about 100 billion devices out there running ARM, okay, CEO thinks that that's going to hit up to a trillion. Even if it doesn't reach trillion, it only reads half a trillion, 500 billion. We're still talking about a bunch of devices out there running ARM, and even today's keynote, I guess in the morning when Matthew was talking about how we're starting to see this plateau in Fedora, we want to increase those numbers, right, we want to increase our contributors, we want to increase these devices that are out there peening the servers, and just the numbers in general, right, so I mean this is definitely something that should interest everyone here that's, you know, in the Fedora world, and if you want to learn more of him, like I said, please feel free to visit those websites and learn more about Lenovo. 964's was founded quite later, and the goal originally was to provide cost-effective or, you know, low-cost hardware, ARM hardware for developers like you all to kind of fiddle with and play around with to develop ARM and make it better. Now, since then, we have pushed out a whole bunch of devices. We pair up vendors, chip vendors, we pair them up with manufacturers, distributors, and try to do our best to make sure that they follow this ARM specification, and right now I want to kind of take a little bit of the, what is it, order of operations and break down what we consider the 964 specification. It is an open hardware specification. A lot of people think open hardware, common specification, but it's actually an open hardware specification, which means the specification itself is open, not the hardware, not necessarily all the time. And so that being said, we'll talk about this later when it comes to, when it comes to the software enablement. This is kind of brought in some problems that we're going to try and tackle. But yes, again, there you go. There's some more resources around 964s, and for those of you who would like to read more, it's not the whole point of this talk to talk all about 964s in this sense. So I just kind of leave that there with you to read more about. Now, talking a little bit more about this hardware and the specification, you can see that we've pushed out various devices and many of you who have said you've heard about 964s might be familiar more so with the consumer edition side of things. I know Peter in the audience, Rob in the audience, many, many have been playing around with the Dragon board 410c, the high key. And all of these are different SOCs that lay on the same footprint. So this is kind of what makes the 964s ecosystem so attractive to people who are developing. And someone I think in the audience, or in Peter's conversation, was talking about IoT and sensors and all these other kind of, this other kind of enablement that you might want around IoT. And with that regard, I mean, here, so here we're looking at 964s the same footprint right over here, the enterprise edition right here that you might see the same footprint. And then the TV based off the enterprise edition, extended CE edition, which should also work within the same kind of footprint compounds. And then an IoT edition over here. Right. But with having the same footprint and having it be SOC independent, you open up opportunities for the market of mezzanines, what we call mezzanines. So what Raspberry Pi might call hats and arduinos might call shields, we call them mezzanines. And these boards have been coming out of the woodworks. Quite literally, they just keep coming out. I can't even keep track of them. You know, there's, there's all sorts of companies that have just come out and release. I'm just going to talk quickly about this one right here. There was a university up in San Francisco that needed a camera. And they couldn't figure out how to use it on the Dragon board 410c. So then they just developed this board all by themselves, printed it out. And then they started selling it on eBay, just popped up on eBay one day, I was like, okay, great. Yeah, now we can use cameras on all these different 96 points. They're still working on submitting drivers and doing all sorts of cool stuff with this. You can literally go to IP Bay and buy that right now. Why do I say this? Well, because right now, Fedora really isn't running on our devices. And if it were, people would have access to getting there. If it was, and we're going to talk about this too, but if it was, and people would have access to a plethora of IO and a plethora of or a very vibrant ecosystem that that's continued to growing faster than I can even keep track of. So this is the mezzanine page right here. And you can go to 964.org, you can read all about all these little devices here for the most part. Any questions so far? 964, the specifications mezzanine, no sir. Sir, why do you put any flat flash or something on the boards as part of the specification? Boom. That's that's actually one of the last slides that we're going to be talking about. We can talk about it right now a little bit, Peter, you want to Yeah, so one of the roles that I've picked up is that I actually sit on the 964 steering committee. And one of the first things that I go with them about was flash on board for firmware and such stuff. And the intention I understand is that for version two of the city and other specs that are due out shortly, there will be that requirement. Yeah, so Peter does sit on the steering committee on behalf of I believe Red Hat Fedora. So yeah, Red Hat is a whole but Fedora well sent us. And, and so this is only recently that that kind of Peter started sitting on the steering committee. We've had several meetings and the specification 2.0 is in the making, right? And this will of course be proposed to the steering committee. We have meetings, I think once a month or so. And hopefully this will move forward. And that is particularly something we're trying to address. To me, that's the first thing we're trying to use any of the boards is getting the bootloader and firmware in place to make it. So in case any of my supervisors are watching, they're saying, SDI flash on the specification. It's critical to get that out of the specifications. What we're hearing at Fedora Flock 2017. Thank you. Um, did you have a question, sir? Yes, I should wait until the end. Okay, all right. Perfect. So the whole point of me kind of talking a bit about the community. First of all, obviously, I'm a community manager, but I wanted to kind of give an idea to everyone about what our reaches kind of what our goals and what our reaches and why it's important for Fedora to be a part of this as a whole, right? Personally, I have been trying to create a community from I want to almost say scratch to that that kind of banks ourselves on organic growth, we have very strong engagement from our people. I want to make sure that anyone who talks to me or the involved community feels that they're being listened to. So there's an active give and take. And I promise that that is what will happen. Interactive improvement. And like I said, you know, this active listening will feed into a very interactive improvement, give and take. Once again, we want to make sure that we're doing what what is best and that it's being pushed forward as a community. And then, of course, there's always new initiatives and new things that kind of float into my head or the community's head every now and then and we try to, you know, make them happen, right? And this will hopefully feed into everything that is above. What is the reach that we have here at 96 boards? We participate with many huge companies. I mean, this includes arm, ballcom, ballway, high silicon, many distributors arrow, and the list goes on. You want to go to the Lenaro website 96 boards website, you can see all of our partners. There's a lot of people that want to be involved with this movement. And with that comes a lot of visibility. We participate in hackathons. We just recently got accepted with Qualcomm into the Major League hackathons, which is a global initiative, where 96 boards will be present at every single one of these hackathons. They will have access to all the operating systems that come with these 96 boards. And people, kids, students, all walks of life will be working on these boards, lots of visibility worldwide. academics. I personally work with several universities in the United States in Brazil, in Mexico, hopefully soon to be China and India. And these are all professors, faculty that want to get 96 boards into the university classrooms. This is a really big deal. And we are trying to move forward with this quickly and also efficiently. conferences and workshops, you know, right here. This is an example of being at a conference, hopefully spreading the 96 boards word, creating evangelists and having fun together workshops. I've given several workshops, other people give lots of good workshops. And yeah, it's another good reason. But yeah, the list goes on, right? When I'll connect for those of you who aren't related with the network, an equity is connect.linaro.org. You can search for that. It's a conference that we do twice a year. You get leading industry professionals in this world from all over the world that show up in one place, similar to Pandora flock, actually. And it's all about collaboration and and talking business and talking community. And so that's a lot of fun happened twice a year. This time is going to be in San Francisco next month. So those of you who are interested, social media, and then again, initiatives. So for those of you who feel like following you go search 96 boards all over the place. What are some of the initiatives that I have been working on personally right now? And this is just to kind of build up the reach but open hours for those of you who aren't familiar with open hours, I host a live podcast. It's a video stream that happens every week at Thursday on Thursday at 4 p.m. Peter was actually just on there. I have a picture of Peter smiling on the show. You can see this. But but yeah, so open hours is the awesome initiative. If you ever have any questions, you want to just come in, you know, talk, vent, get involved in the community in any way. You can join this call. It's 96ports.org forward slash open hours. And that happens every Thursday will happen this Thursday Thursday noon here, noon East Coast. Yes, 4 p.m. UTC. That's unchanging. Projects and projects pages, websites, documentation. Our whole website now is back rendered from GitHub. So our website or documentation, everything this is community driven. If you want to change something on our website, submit it, gatekeeper will review it and maybe, you know, our website gets changed. But everything is interactive now. This is just an example of one of the open hours episodes here. This is a Brazilian partnership that we got involved in. These are all folks from Brazil. They went into a hackathon. It was an internet or a national hackathon in Brazil. They all won. They flew up to San Diego. We took over the Qualcomm Think of It Lab. And we all did a nice show there. It was a lot of fun. All these folks are from different companies all around Brazil. They all made really cool projects and they will all be visible through Qualcomm and 96ports. Here's another show we did with Monero and Covery. If you're not familiar with the cryptocurrency Monero, it's rumored that and I'm not saying that this really happened. But the day after this show, their whole value of Monero went up like 300%. It was crazy. I'm not kidding. I talked to the lead devs, which is Ricardo, HYC, Justin, he's also involved there. I don't know if they're going to say it was because of the show, but I didn't notice that. It was pretty cool. And then here's Peter. Happy Peter. He was talking about Fedora and of course, as he mentioned, soon we hope to have Fedora running on our 96ports. It is mostly there. In fact, it runs on the high key. It's being polished. Come to my talk tomorrow and you'll hear more about it. There you go. Peter, stop. Some of the projects that people are getting involved in, these are all community-driven projects. None of these were done by people at 96ports. As far as I know, none of them, no one was paid to do these. These are just projects that are surfacing, people that are getting involved in this ecosystem. Now that we've talked, software enablement. So this is where I'm done. This is more of a discussion. I want to talk about two things. First is early access hardware. This is kind of the easy part. So I'm dealing with all of these companies, like I said, the chip makers that put their chips on the boards, they get with the manufacturers and they get with the distributors and they all send these boards out. I've kind of come across a lot of problems here because the boards sell out too quickly, in which case the people who are supposed to have these boards don't get their hands on them in time, or they just, or yeah, that's actually pretty much it. They just sell out too quickly or they don't make enough. So early access hardware is what I'm trying to work with our distributors with. They're going to create pockets boards and so that way I can talk with Peter, who is kind of representing you all here. If you need a board, if you feel like contributing, if you feel like being a part of this, then please contact Peter. Peter can reach out to me and we will get this hardware in your hands as quickly as possible. Is that okay with you Peter? Yep. Awesome. And then the next is standards and compliance. What 96 boards does for you to use the 96 boards name is your board goes through a series of compliance checks. Now in the past it's possible that certain compliance has been slightly lenient. We plan on adjusting these standards and being more strict on compliance. This will of course help anyone who's in the process of enabling software, anyone who wants to be in this ecosystem and work on this type of stuff to you know do it easier, do it better and that's the whole idea. Now with regards to the standards, this is kind of what I'm calling the specification. What are the standards that we need to enforce and that is the specification. Peter, who sits on on the steering committee, along with many others who are involved in software enablement as well. I won't name any other companies but they also I'm sure would love this to happen. And so you know let's talk about getting the SPI flash on there. Let's talk about you know getting the members or the partners that are releasing these chips to get to focus more on UEFI, to focus on UBoot. Let's get these, let's get everything more unified right and that's kind of the goal. And so that's that's kind of all I have here. We're hoping that this will start to show movement really soon within the next few months, within the next six months. We're going to have some big meetings next month and connect in San Francisco so I'm sure that we'll start seeing a lot of this move forward. That's it. So in the standards, is there any requirements that the vendors upstream support that they go? So the question is, is there anything that forces the vendors to submit upstream? So yes, I want to say yes and no. So there's two components to that because the standard itself is actually a hardware standard so it doesn't actually cover the software side of it at all. Yeah, so while I would say yes and no is only because they don't want to release a crappy board, right? No one wants to release something that no one's going to use at which point Lenaro and 96 boards offer a big amount of guidance, right? And then we also offer various levels of support. So for vendors or members, partners who are interested in getting involved in this upstream process, which in my opinion has a very high learning curve and also requires a certain reputation to get involved, you can actually work with Lenaro and do and get involved in that. However, yes, it's not as enforced as I think I would like it to be. So this is also one of the things that I've also been leading as part of the steering committee. It's certainly not just me, but like if you look at the original HIKI when it was released, there was no source going through it upstream. If you look at the HIKI 960, it's pretty much all upstream already and it's only sort of just been out a little while. So the 96 boards guys certainly weren't that good to start with, but you know it's been loaded in curve for them as well and like the Dragon board now is pretty much all upstream and we've been working with Qualcomm to sort out the firmware redistribution issues and a bunch of those firmwares landed into the Linux firmware stuff now, so that's starting to become less of a problem and Qualcomm is very aware of that and so is dealing with that earlier rather than later with their legal teams. It's a learning curve and it's getting better. Like we should have two of the 96 boards supported in Fedora 27. There's no way we could have done that two years ago, so is there much required outside of since we're rebasing kernels anyway, doesn't that mean that eventually 26 will be able to run those same boards or is there more user space that has to support them? No, in theory 26 should be able to but then we then have to regenerate the images and they have to go through QA and I personally don't have enough I didn't mean like us spin new images I was just saying yes like so I'll throw a card over oh yeah yep so similarly over the open hardware specification versus open hardware specification on the other hand then you say choose what you need to have in there that you don't have open source components I'm not going to use the names here it makes it really hard and the developer or current developers want to be able to think of it like that if there are any influence to say if we're going to be in the two realms or spirit we need to be able to have something that has a workable graphics to actually be able to do it if you want to do that at all well I mean I understand that the mechanism for this again hardware specification on the other hand can't ignore the software you can absolutely did you want to say anything to that Peter? No I'm leaving that one to you yeah so this is a tough one so this is a tough one right because like you just said it's a specification and in a lot of cases we have already seen and again I won't say any names but we've seen boards come out that just call themselves 96 boards because they just have access to the specification they didn't go through any compliance tests they didn't contact us in some cases and then we now have to reach out and get this process rolling right so sometimes it's too late and we didn't have an opportunity to to give them these recommendations or push them in this direction now can we enforce this to happen I want to say no I don't think that we can absolutely enforce it um sorry why not? well for that example that I just kind of gave right now so like we can't absolutely enforce it but this is something also that maybe Peter and I can bring up in a steering committee meeting and start moving forward on right because this is a committee it's something that's driven by the community itself it is I mean you have a trademark though right it's kind of like with Fedora anybody can do a Fedora spin if they want to but they can't call it Fedora and use our trademarks unless it meets certain requirements yes so you know I can make it right now oh no wait I can make a 96 board but I can't call it a 96 board unless I've gone through this process or I'm opening I would assume I mean this is I'm certainly not a lawyer no you're right that would require like you know a little bit more legal attention yeah yeah but I think one of the keys is that we're I work for Lunaro so so we are a software company we're not trying to be a hardware company it's a hardware spec that we've come up with to basically support the software community so we we invest not just Robert but we have a lot of our greatest software people working with the 96 boards to try to do so right but the purpose is then if you end up with a trademark block we'd say there aren't actually open setifications there that you fundamentally can't really do a whole block so there's a there's a good point though like what Mike just said right now is that you know it's hard for us to enforce all of these things because we're not a hardware company we are a software company at its core right so at the end of the day if a board doesn't want to be successful then they will probably do those things if a board wants to be successful then they will do the right thing they'll open as much as possible and that's something that we can't control however we can't push our recommendations on them and we'll try our best but you're going to have 96 boards that are more prominent in the ecosystem and you're going to have 96 boards that are less prominent and I mean in in the GPU stuff like if I go back five years there was literally no open source accelerated GPUs and now like for my slide deck for tomorrow there's we've got four or five that are supported and in the 96 boards case Qualcomm Dragon Board one is probably one of the success stories there thank you Rob with regards to the free Drino driver the certain other major key manufacturer that sells display IP that they haven't opened up well it's which is shipped on a couple of the other 96 board platforms is I mean ultimately they're getting beaten from every side in the open source community about it and and they're still not and there's not a lot unless we get someone like Rob that reverse engineers it and you know and at the last connect there was discussions about that and their closed source blobs are a bit easier to use with Wayland which means we could probably use them in RPM fusion with less stress similar to the Nvidia like binary blobs for x86 which is not ideal by any stretch of the imagination like I would just like another I'd like to clone Rob three or four times to build that other problem but but it not not in that particular vendor's case but there's other situations where like the Etna BIM and the free Drino driver Broadcom finally got the message with the Raspberry Pi with the VC core driver so the ecosystem there is slowly improving I'm kind of looking on with interest from imagination which opens the power of the R stuff given that they've now lost Apple as a customer and and suddenly like maybe they will start to care about Linux just simply because it then becomes a key part of their revenue because they don't have the cash cow that is Apple um yeah it's hard it hasn't got that it has got better except for one or two particular vendors where they've been uh decidedly stubborn this side sir yes both of you I break my fingers you sir yeah no you can I think it's probably too just to say that you could tighten this persecution down in that way because then there would be a lot of fewer boards that actually were 96 points because of course you've got to pull the spec but you can't control what hardware manufacturers do so yeah and this kind of stuff comes up quite often you have to be very delicate with the specification especially when there's so many people sitting and giving their their opinions during these meetings right you have to be delicate and you have to be kind of I don't want to say slow moving but something that for instance starts off as optional in the specification might then become recommended in the second one and then by the third one it'll be an absolute enforced part right so that these boards continue to roll out and you keep everyone kind of happy so maybe this type of thing becomes something that's optional right now but recommended in the next spec well then in 3.0 it becomes absolutely enforced required basically so that was there two and a half years ago when all this started it's come a long way and it is a lot more open now and a lot more supported than ever now good good get to here thank you I mean a whole idea just literally came to try to empower our own developers our great relationship with ARM we couldn't get the high power system to point ourselves at a reasonable cost so that's what came and then just started sharing Robert and others have done a tremendous job of spreading the word yeah lead times a long time ago lead times cost it's huge I mean now you can get your hands on boards for seventy five dollars ike nine sixty is two hundred fifty nine dollars you know it's cost per for the board that's pretty pretty decent I mean with most distros supporting our our arm being that kind of thing with proper servers but the only things that's that's I can see in my price range are toy systems if you will and ninety six board is no different than anyone else other than us being more open to ease and things of people can implement I'm stuck with two or four pigs and ran ports all around the edges and whatnot I know how to build a computer but where's the where's the interest in making something I can do that with so are you talking about along the lines of developing something or you know contributing to something like the door are you talking about developing a product and actually creating something to sell well if so if I want to if I want to help uh or help the arch secure the arch 64 or those kinds of things along I'm stuck with I'm stuck with low power really tiny or tiny systems and even not or even ninety six or ninety six E thing is a tougher is a custom form factor is a small system and whatnot it's not something bigger like the or like the PCIU and the 64 yeah so you're talking about getting something more powerful kind of like a laptop machine something that you can develop on that's I want an equivalent to my work station yes okay so so where's the interest in that so Linus Talbot was at two connects ago said basically exactly the same thing that he basically wants a muck style device that he can compile and turn a lot of full speed correct um where probably a third generation um V8 actual silicon at the moment and so speeds are going up prices it's coming down I don't know about I don't know these products but looking at some of the SOCs that are coming down the line I suspect you'll start to see that in the coming months I'm more thinking I would like something I can put in a stand or in a standard PC yes or like once a brand yeah mini ATX micro ATX that sort of thing um and and like the 9640 EE has a micro ATX mini ATX options part of the spec anyone actually building those uh not that I've seen released yeah so so yeah so all I can say with regards to that is stay tuned I'm you know like Peter said you might see something in the next few months it's it's uh it is definitely of high interest so you know like I've heard rumors I've I've not seen any product announcements yet but you know the chips are becoming more widely available I mean they've been talking about SPSA compliance servers that are of high spec for well Mr Masters has been talking about it for five years and it will and you can now finally like buy decent spec servers that are doing that you know I've been wanting them for the already infrastructure for five years and and you know they're finally starting to get there so the servers are there now and then you know ultimately the prices will start to come down and you know you'll start to see more competition on the market and stuff like that so I'm sure and given what Linus has said like if I want to be successful they need to start producing devices like this the Windows 10 laptop which is a Qualcomm 835 is a really really nice SOC and I know it runs UEFI out of the box but if it's anything like the last Microsoft pretend to arm they use secure boot to lock it down that only boot Microsoft OS's I've been poking around trying to get an answer to see whether that would be the case this time as well I've not managed to get an answer from anyone yet but you know there's like so the Qualcomm 835 with UEFI would be an awesome 96 board hint hint nudge nut because you know that that is like you know a equivalent of current gen Intel spec with really nice graphics and you know functionality and USB-C and all of that sort of stuff that you would want in a modern day laptop in theory at a reasonable price it's whether like those vendors will do you know non-completely lock down Microsoft addition problem thanks guys yeah no folks thank you very much it was a pleasure you know my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you my own thank you