HCL:Teres-I
The Teres-I is a 64bit ARM based laptop created with KiCAD, and being sold as a kit with full OSHW documentation.
Technical data
- Allwinner A64 SoC
- 4x ARM Cortex-A53 CPU @ 1.2 GHz
- ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU
- Cedrus Video Engine (H.264 En/Decode, H265 Decode)
- 1366x768 LCD
- HDMI 1.4 Port (FullHD @ 60 FPS, 4K @ 30 FPS)
- 2 GiB RAM
- internal 16 GB eMMC, +1 µSD slot
- 2x USB 2.0
- BlueTooth / WiFi using an RTL8723bs combo chip
- built-in microphone and stereo speakers
- 3.5mm 4-contact audio connector (CTIA pinout, "LRGM")
- internal USB Camera
openSUSE Support
Starting with 15.3, the Teres-I is almost fully supported by openSUSE; the distribution runs out of the box once a custom boot loader is installed.
There is a staging area for the work in progress in OBS
-- Caveats --
There is no automated image creation yet. Things to watch out for when doing this manually:
- shorten the GPT
The A64 reads its SPL from absolute address 0x2000 (8kiB) from the (e)MMC. A GPT with only 56 entries will end just before that point, and a partition starting there and extending to 1MiB is the perfect place for u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin .
- modify U-Boot environment once installed
The USB keyboard is slow to come up, and the audio jack is connected to the serial console by default. Add
usb stop; usb start;
and
gpio set PL9
somewhere in the flow of automatically executed scripts.
- MMC driver loading is racy
Occasionally mmc-blk grabs the interface of the WiFi/BT chip; make sure the rtl8723bs driver is loaded as early as possible.
- DRI driver requires contiguous memory.
Add
cma=16M
to the kernel command line. Otherwise the screen will stay blank after the EFI FB has been decommissioned.
For complete graphics support, cma=256M is probably a better choice to offer more
RAM to the graphics engine.