Am Mon, 29 Oct 2018 20:44:23 +0100 hat patrick patrick@wylight.de geschrieben:
Hi,
Thanks for your support and addition.
Hi Ed, I want to add a few words to support Nikolaus position:
I am waiting for more developers having hardware and helping to fix missing things where we know for long time they are missing. So trying to provide them already with a kernel where EVERYTHING works seems to build a deadlock...
That's the point. We don't need perfect HW/SW all we need to start is HW, which is able to boot. For me there is only one target kernel version and that is Linus prepatch tree. With our lack of man power we have to mainline as much and fast as possible.
Well, yes, but that is exactly the problem here. Almost ALL of the prototypes we've sent out had some kind of hardware issue. The one who wanted to work on the volume wheel daemon got a unit with a broken volume wheel. A lot of units had other random issues as well. I know this is normal for a prototype production run (it was the same with the Pandora), however, it was a very frustrating experience for most developers who wanted to work on the unit and didn't even know if these issue were broken hardware or software. Some even spent a lot of their free time trying to fix something that wasn't broken - they simply were unlucky enough to receive a unit with hardware issues.
So I don't want to send any more units out which haven't run through basic hardware tests. With basic I mean: Just a simple test of every known component to show that the unit itself shouldn't have an issue.
Optimizing and fixing drivers, etc. can be done by the devs, but we first need to be sure the hardware is working.
Nikolaus did test all the hardware components during development (he had to make sure his layout isn't broken), so these tests all existed and were working at some times.
This was nothing that made the hardware itself usable (sound still needs a lot of work, even though the tester can output some sound).
I simply don't want to send a unit out to someone, for example, who wants to work on audio and after he spent hours and hours, we find out that the hardware chip on the board is broken.
Bluetooth, GPS, Audio, etc. had all been tested by Nikolaus before - but it wasn't working anymore (not even the simple tests) with the latest kernel versions.
I'm fearing we lose a lot of good devs simply because I ship out broken units. So all I need are simple hardware tests now, not fully fledged bug-free software solutions.