New Orange Pi 800, System76 Open Firmware, and More
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New Orange Pi 800 Juices Storage to 128GB
Aping the Raspberry Pi 400 form factor, the Orange Pi 800 provides onboard eMMC storage which has just been doubled.
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Major Updates for System76 Open Firmware!
We prefer to disable the Intel Management Engine wherever possible to reduce the amount of closed firmware running on System76 hardware. We’ve resolved a coreboot bug that allows the Intel ME (Management Engine) to once again be disabled.
This bug was a buffer overflow which caused coreboot firmware memory to be overwritten by the TPM measurement log, keeping the S3 suspend method from working properly. As a result of this, we had to switch from S3 to S0ix suspend, which required use of the Intel ME in order for OS-level drivers to function.
By fixing this bug, we were able to move back to S3 and re-disable the Intel ME on most platforms. (However, S3 suspend is not functional in the silicon we received for 11th Gen (Tiger Lake) U-class CPUs.) This fix was submitted upstream to coreboot as well.
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Using M2 Wi-Fi card slots for other things
Why is this awesome? For rational people, it isn’t. But for masochistic Mini-ITX builders such as myself, our boards are limited to a single PCI-express slot. Gaining an additional M.2 slot opens up a rare extra possibility for internal expansion that, for once, doesn’t involve using dodgy internal USB connections.