On 03/24/2016 01:14 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 07:18:23AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:

...

Hi Folks,

I wanted to just drop a quick note that we're making *great* progress toward having early 96Boards "Cello" boards for Fedora enablement purposes. These are (AArch64) AMD Seattle based boards:

http://www.lenovator.com/product/103.html

These are SBSA/SBBR compliant boards that (from a software point of view) look just like ARM servers. They're also low-ish cost (for a server - $300+the cost of RAM and disk, etc.). Yes, they're not in a standard ATX form factor. We know this. Before you rant about that, consider that the goal here is to give developers a tiny board on their desk that happens to meet the software requirements for server - we all hope there will be many more server platforms that are ATX size soon.

We ought to be in a very solid position to be able to support these quickly in Fedora. I've got plans in place to get some early boards to key folks needed to make that happen. I've also previously booted Fedora on an early board with a couple of tweaks that need cleanup. I'll followup with details, and with the individuals who are getting early boards (they know who they are) to help get this moving.

This is good news, especially that they are non-junk SBSA/SBBR- compliant boards[1].

Thanks for the kind works :) I'm going to keep beating the SBSA drum. Sadly on the consumer side of 64-bit ARM, vendors just don't care about being successful in the mainstream (because they are far too naive and not being correctly steered to do the right thing - and actively being steered in the wrong direction by folks like Canonical who stand to monetize the enablemement of each and every individual platform in the wrong way for the industry overall) - they want to make hacks for the weekend with random firmware that makes life nasty for everyone just because they won't spend a few cents more on some damned flash with decent firmware and do this like a real computer should be done. On the server side, we have Red Hat influence, and I intend to keep using that to force people to make useful, general purpose hw. that can run a variety of Operating Systems like a real computer should be built.

In a few years, everyone else will start to wake up, once they see that they could actually be successful with a general purpose approach. But it's going to take 5 years for most of them to understand. And many consumer folks never will understand how to build a real computer.

I ordered one of these the day they were announced. Any idea when they'll be delivered :-?

The goal is ramp volume production next month. I'm getting regular updates, so once we go to volume production, I'll get you a date. I'm also working with that team on branding for the Cello, and would like to include Fedora as well as CentOS and RHEL(SA). I've already mentioned that to a few folks, and we'll followup properly.

Jon.