Purism Continues To Explore i.MX6/i.MX8 For The Librem 5 Phone

Todd Weaver of Purism has provided an update on the planned Librem 5 smartphone hardware components and that with a development board they do have Debian booting.

Debian GNU/Linux unstable is now working with an iMX6 development board and can boot Wayland with GNOME. Their testing has been with the i.MX6 SoC paired with the Etnaviv graphics stack.

The i.MX6 series is already rather dated with using ARM Cortex-A9 cores with Vivante graphics. These SoCs have been around since 2011 and aren't all that spectacular compared to other modern SoCs. Especially with the Librem 5 not expected to ship until 2019, it would be an embarrassment and sluggish experience to see a new smartphone making use of this chip.

Fortunately, Purism is hoping to get in an i.MX8. The i.MX8 make use of Cortex-A53 cores and some models also feature additional Cortex-A72 cores. The i.MX8 uses Vivante GC7000 series. They won't know for a few months if they will be able to get the i.MX8 suiting their needs for the Purism 5, plus the fact that Etnaviv doesn't yet support the GC7000 graphics, but at least it's looking like it might happen. Todd wrote, "we will very likely be using the i.MX8M in the Librem 5."

The brief Librem 5 hardware update can be read at Puri.sm.