Now that the donations are in, it’s time to start putting them to use. If there’s any cool project you would like to use one of the available ARM boards or if you’re interested in doing enablement of those boards to make GNOME run on them please get in touch with me on IRC or drop me a line at aruiz gnome org.
I have to note that requests to use them as your home server or for non-GNOME related stuff are discouraged, these boards were donated with the purpose of improving support for the ARM ecosystem in GNOME.
Here’s the list of the HW and who has them.
There are a few Banana Pi available (most with a Mali 400 GPU and two BPi M2s with a PowerVR SGX54MP2), so these are trickier to get GNOME Shell running on, if anyone enjoys reverse engineering GPUs, Malis are very popular these days and they get very little love as the Lima project is a bit silent for some time now. People looking into porting llvmpipe to ARM are also more than welcome!
As per the Qualcomm boards, they run with the freedreno driver (by the way, props to Rob Clark for his amazing work on this driver) and I was able to run a GNOME on Wayland on them using the official Debian image, so they are more suitable if you want to focus on the upper layers of the stack.
I would like to reiterate my gratitude to Banana Pi and Qualcomm for their generosity for the hardware, as well as ARM and Codethink for the server side stuff that is already being used in our GNOME Continuous efforts.
And of course, I’m going to GUADEC! I’ll be taking the boards with me, so if you think you have something interesting to do with them and you are attending just find me around.
Silicon Island 