LWN: Comments on "Greybus"

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

marcH — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 01:14:25 +0000

> I suspect that most people want phones that are tightly integrated and deliver the features they need, not some bulky thing with swapable components (that they'd never swap) but maybe that's just me.

Yeah and I suspect many consumers would rather see their pocket space being used for more battery than for additional connectors.

Now there's something that wasn't clear for me from just the article: could UniPro help tightly integrated phones too? Even for integrated systems without any removable piece this could help re-use, faster development and competition, no?

Also: are there other embedded and slightly less space-constrained markets where UniPro could help?

If the answer is no every time then I wouldn't bet on its future.

"Tightly integrated"?

fredrik — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 07:39:32 +0000

Agree. Apart from the repair aspect, and giving more hardware options to the general population, there is another angle too. Ara devices allow special purpose sensors to be plugged into a otherwise mostly ordinary and notably network approved cellular communications device.

As an example, you can imagine plugging in an infrared barcode scanner for logistics work. You avoid the clutter of a separate scanner that use unreliable nearfield communication to communicate with your logistics app and requires that the user handles two hand held devices instead of one. And you don't have to standardise on today's rare and rather expensive cellular devices with pre-integrated IR-scanners.

Ara allows small ISV:s to compete on such markets where producing special purpose hardware with integrated cellular communication today is prohibitively expensive. Now, worst case you have to develop your own Ara module. And if you're lucky, you can find a suitable extensible Ara module that fits your purpose off the shelve.

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

flussence — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 22:56:39 +0000

It sounds less crazy if you'll note this is the direction PCs evolved. Everything speaks ATA, USB and PCI, components for those are cheap commodity parts, there's healthy competition in the market; those weren't the norm 20-25 years ago.

The closed bus standard doesn't bother me, but the fact it comes from Nokia (now a patent troll) may.

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

k8to — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 22:24:50 +0000

There's a generally accepted level of accessibility which is known as RAND or resonable and non-discriminatory which tech-industries wide is expected for certain types of documentation/specification. Historically "reasonable" was understood to mean that corporate entities could reasonably afford it, and the pricing would be at values like 10 or 50 thousand dollars US.

These values are clearly not "reasonable" for individual contributors. And moreover in the modern era it is very questionable what that high fee is for, since the costs for information dissemination are so low.

As a result, there has been some beginning of adjustment for what is a reasonable pricing to fit into the RAND style labelling. It's happening slowly, but it does seem to be occurring.

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

dlang — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 21:26:13 +0000

that 10GE is the speed that the components of the phone can talk to each over over the few inches between them on the wired backplane.

it's not a wireless communications like 802.11*

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

mtaht — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 21:15:41 +0000

I would really love greybus to play with for non-phones - like home routers. 10GigE is nicely greater than 802.11ad.

On other fronts, am I the only one that wants to have a high speed, low latency multi-channel audio interface that plugs right into the internet?

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

cry_regarder — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:58:57 +0000

Make it ruggedized and I could see many applications for this type of tek.

Greybus

jezuch — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 13:09:45 +0000

> (The name evidently comes from the gray color of the original prototype device; nobody has since come up with a better one).

Well, "Gregbus", obviously :) (Keeping with the spirit of Linus^WLinux!)

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

gregkh — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 15:50:21 +0000

> So what's happening?

Same as almost all other specifications, take for example PCI, the rules for access to that spec is the same as this one.

Sure, some working groups are getting much better at this (like UEFI and ACPI), and others are getting worse (USB kicked the Linux developers out of the working groups), but overall, all that matters in the end is if the code gets implemented with the correct license for your operating system for your hardware.

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

gb — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 09:16:10 +0000

This makes sense, but there is a limit - beyond which there is no point to reduce size of the device. It can't be smaller than a screen, thinner that a battery + screen. So, I think mobile devices already reached some point there would be no more progress in format and that makes opportunities to improvement.

"Tightly integrated"?

smurf — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 05:54:34 +0000

The point about this bus idea is that you can tightly integrate whatever actually is in the phone.

Also, "tightly integrated" basically means "whenever a single part breaks, you get to throw away the whole thing and get a new phone" instead of swapping out just the broken piece.

Same thing for s/breaks/is inadequate/ because, you know, requirements change. Get a new job? may need a dual-SIM module. Start playing geocaching or Ingress? need a better GPS. Start vblogging? need a µSD slot and maybe a video-optimized camera instead of the megapixel monster.

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

ay — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 04:29:38 +0000

There's nothing about this project as far as I can tell that says they require a "FLOSS standard", it seems like they did research and picked the best standard to work off of rather than reinventing a wheel.

You may think what you think and that's nice but that's not at all how the industry works and standards don't have to be FLOSS to work (or even work effectively).

What continues to amaze me is how much engineering effort seems to be going into this project, it seems like a lot of time and money spent on a problem in search of a solution or something that no one asked for. I suspect that most people want phones that are tightly integrated and deliver the features they need, not some bulky thing with swapable components (that they'd never swap) but maybe that's just me.

Greybus FLOSS relationship?

bokr — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 03:32:33 +0000

The standards link in the article leads to

http://mipi.org/specifications/unipro-specifications

where it says

"Specifications are available to MIPI members only. For more information on joining MIPI, please go to Join MIPI."

Joining is not just a logwall -- looks like a paywall which if you have to ask how high, you can't afford it.

Such policy does not seem very compatible with FLOSS ;-/

(Personally, I think there ought to be a law saying nothing can
call itself a "standard" without having free complete documentation
in a FLOSS format available on the internet).

So what's happening?