Any progress since 2018?

[khumarahn]

Hi! I have a Teres, but I haven't been using it for perhaps 5 years. I love the idea of the repairable and sustainable laptop, but I stopped using it for 2 main reasons:
* with the mainline kernel, power management and suspend didn't work, battery life sucked big way,
* it was slow, not only in a browser, but even for very basic work, like vim with a latex plugin.

Has anything changed? If I understand correctly, the plans for a new motherboard are in a perpetual limbo. But what about the power management?

[LubOlimex]

Suspend still doesn't work and graphics hardware acceleration drivers are at the same state. Binary blobs can probably be used but require knowledge and break the open source nature of the project.

[khumarahn]

ok, thank you.

Has there been any progress on battery life? Switching from 3.* kernel to mainline decreased battery life very strongly

[kreyren]

Suspend still doesn't work and graphics hardware acceleration drivers are at the same state. Binary blobs can probably be used but require knowledge and break the open source nature of the project.

bullshiiiet! suspend works, CPUIdle implemented in Crust since https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust/commit/588aef2a0f687fd84b8c7c37402c6006b6c1cc7f and Crust version 0.6 (https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust/issues/211)

Just make sure that you have SWAP or IT WILL NOT WORK! at the size of your DRAM + reasonable tolerance e.g. 1 GB

That said i recommend setting suspend-then-hibernate as CPUIdle will disable all but one core and underclocks it which gives teres like 12h of suspend time before it drains the battery and turns off where with hibernation it suspend and after X seconds it will hibernate which will last until you open it again and gets in system under 1 sec on my end.


"and graphics hardware acceleration drivers are at the same state"

bullshiiiiet! Mesa works great just be aware of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/8198 and that you need https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/commit/c426e5677f36c3b0b8e8ea199ed4f2c7fad06d47 patch otherwise Asahi Lina and her macbook von Asahi Linux will haunt your system with `DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB failed: Cannot allocate memory` most of distributions already seem to have implemented patches, but NixOS currently very broken due to their internal policies which should be resolved next week.

"Binary blobs can probably be used but require knowledge and break the open source nature of the project."

Fuck blobs! We run without these 100% FOSS no blobs needed. run linux-libre it works great!

* with the mainline kernel, power management and suspend didn't work, battery life sucked big way,

Let me know if the battery life sucks on new release e.g. https://www.armbian.com/olimex-teres-a64 it seems to last at least 3 days on my non-heavy usage, but looking for motivations to fry the AXP803s to see what battery we can upgrade it to optionally join my club of annoying tsvetan about advice about this~

* it was slow, not only in a browser, but even for very basic work, like vim with a latex plugin.

Loading is slow, i recommend using 128GB MicroSD XC I sdcard to get that somewhat more reasonable as the emmc is slow trash optionally look at https://www.olimex.com/forum/index.php?topic=9095.0 the powerpins on teres's mainboard are weak, but datasheet seems to indicate that the chip would work anyway, again club of annoying tsvetan with questions about teres, it's great we don't have membership fees.

ok, thank you.

Has there been any progress on battery life? Switching from 3.* kernel to mainline decreased battery life very strongly

Provide details i try to investigate it :p

---

Beyond that the development is ongoing currently mostly by Debian (jc and his team), Alpine (moslty mps), Parabola (multiple people), Armbian devs(yours truly + sunxi nerds).. Mps even has a cool optimized kernel config that makes teres more responsive which i plan on submitting to upstream linux as defconfig once i do more experiments.

but feel free to ask questions :p

[khumarahn]

@kreygen

Hi. I didn't notice your message until now. Perhaps email notifications don't work in this forum, or I did something wrong.

First time I hear about crust. Any issues with it? How is it installed? Why does one need swap for suspend to ram?

If there's progress with powersave, I'll try to update my gentoo build. Currently, when plugged into charging, with full battery, idle, my teres draws about 1A, i.e. 5W. I don't have other objective measurements about battery life at hand, just memory that it sucked after I switched to the mainline kernel.

[khumarahn]

Ah, and there was another thing which bothered me quite a bit, I wonder if that has a chance to be solved.

The key combination Super+Left didn't work. This is a usual way to switch between windows in i3 and similar desktop environments, so a rather big problem.

[kreyren]

First time I hear about crust. Any issues with it? How is it installed? Why does one need swap for suspend to ram?

To u-boot all major distros should provide it there by default if it's not there then let me know and i try to fix it. For installation follow https://docs.u-boot.org/en/stable/board/allwinner/sunxi.html tl;dr just export SCP variable during build that points to the scp.bin binary (crust)

Both crust and u-boot have a pre-defined config files crust since 0.6 that i requested to be staged for it.

If there's progress with powersave, I'll try to update my gentoo build. Currently, when plugged into charging, with full battery, idle, my teres draws about 1A, i.e. 5W. I don't have other objective measurements about battery life at hand, just memory that it sucked after I switched to the mainline kernel.

Ohh i knew your name's familiar! i found your repo before https://github.com/khumarahn/teres1-gentoo and credited you on postmarketos wiki https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OLIMEX_Teres_i

Happy to help you with the development feel free to reach me over kreyren@fsfe.org or on IRC as KREYREN if you need anything.

powersave generally works i use the system as daily with hybernation to preserve battery and that way i can go around 3 days with it doing engineering in freecad.

my teres draws about 1A, i.e. 5W.

it draws 5 Volts at 1 Amp => 5 Watts direct current

don't have other objective measurements about battery life at hand, just memory that it sucked after I switched to the mainline kernel.

what version? I am not aware of there being massive battery draw like this.

The key combination Super+Left didn't work. This is a usual way to switch between windows in i3 and similar desktop environments, so a rather big problem.

I am not aware of this being an issue on any distro i use Super+Left/Right in GNOME which works without any issues for me.

[khumarahn]

Thanks a lot! Looks like I can make my teres usable again, I'll certainly try.

The only thing that's holding me back is that I want it to run gentoo, so I'll have to look at and copy what armbian is doing for crust and kernel.

I also figured out why the email notifications didn't work: they weren't configured correctly in my profile :-)