René Rebe

For decades fans of AMD, the inventor of x86-64, GPU infused APUs, and avoiders of a 100% Intel x86 monopoly where longing for a really high end quality machines, like IBM^W Lenovo ThinkPads. The dream came finally true, with AMD Ryzen w/ Vega gfx ThinkPads A285 and A485 this year.

This is a developing story, we will update with a review in a day or two.

So when you install some outdated, unsupported and vintage Windows, e.g. 95, for some retro fun or reverse engineering (of old VGA acceleration) the setup.exe was hanging for me in pcem scanning the (emulated) system for problems and such. Turns out the setup.exe has quite some option to skip things, … like:

/IS do not run ScanDisk
/IM skip the memory check
/ID skip the disk-space check
/iw skip Microsoft EULA licensing dialogs

So I do Linux kernel, driver, libraries, gcc, development since 1998. A little bit everywhere, all over the place. X86, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC you name it. I contributed to the Linux distribution ROCK Linux, later became stable release maintainer, and still run the fork #t2sde for embedded and special custom Linux distributions. My company ExactCODE was involved in many embedded projects and development like that, and in 2008 a customer wanted to base a product on the Nvidia Tega SoC, so I wrote Nvidia if they could release us any register level spec, even under NDA, to work on such a project. To my surprise I got an answer, but it was a simple one-liner, and not really what we needed to hear:

How is your Windows CE experience? We are not supporting Linux on Tegra.

Received: from hqnvupgp03.nvidia.com (Not Verified[172.17.102.18]) by hqemgate03.nvidia.com
id ; Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:56:40 -0700
Subject: RE: NVidia SoC SPECs for Embedded Linux systems
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:57:03 -0700
…
How is your Windows CE experience? We are not supporting Linux on Tegra.

—–Original Message—–
…
For the currently engaging projects we need solid 3D support in
our portfolio we would kindly ask for the possibility to sign an NDA
to receive register level specs support NVidia’s latest integrated
embedded SoC’s in our boards support offerings.

Just for those why I can not, and will never recommend chips without register level data sheets available to developer, ..!