Nine years ago I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 as my first Linux PDA. And due to this I am where I am.

I could say that it started two years earlier when I saw PalmOS devices at local geek meetings. But it took me over year before Palm m105… Then was Sony Clie SJ30 — gorgeous device. High resolution, memory card, 16bit colour. Too bad that applications did not make use of it.

So I went for Linux. There were two options: Zaurus or iPaq. Went for former one as it had keyboard. It was good choice.

Quickly started development of packages and joined OpenEmbedded team. Then became one of OpenZaurus developers. After year or something took over release maintenance and released few last versions. 3.5.4(.1) were the best tested releases of OZ ever — I had over hundred testers for each RC image and they provided installation reports, bug reports and fixes. And it had unified installer for whole range of devices (took me several months to get it polished and few guys added own tweaks). When Ångström distribution started I was the one who officially ended OpenZaurus development.

And all that was in free time. But in mean time I created my consulting company. CELF was my first customer ;)

One nice evening I got question on irc and due to that I left dark side of IT and went from PHP programming to embedded Linux full-time. OpenedHand had interesting projects and clients with many devices. Imagine operating system + kernel + Python + GStreamer in 16 megabytes of flash… And I managed to get it done. While working for them I used proper developer boards (not only customer devices) and there were funny moments…

When we worked with ST Microelectronics on NDK-15 (later replaced by NHK-15 from ST Ericsson) I had to merge two kernel trees from two separate teams. Took me 2 days of mangling 20-30MB diffs but got it done. There are people at ST-E which reminded me this during one of Linaro Connects ;D

Also on GUADEC 2007 when we presented new interface for Openmoko phones NDK-15 had to wait for me as no one at stand was able to get it running (U-Boot config needed changes).

But then Intel acquired OpenedHand… The craziest trip of my life was return from London to my parents place. For three months I even had @linux.intel.com email but never used it due to problems with Intel corporate network and Linux (do not ask).

Next was Bug Labs and their BUG device. I cleaned their Poky trees, migrated to latest version and later to use OpenEmbedded directly. Less challenges but I also had few other customers at that time to keep me busy. Some of them were OH customers before and went to me for help.

Time passed, 2010 came. One day Canonical made another attempt to seduce me and this time I decided that it looks like good opportunity so I accepted. Sent BUG 2.0 prototype back to NYC and few weeks later I made crazy train trip to small nowhere near Brussels to meet my new coworkers from NewCore. 1-2 weeks later we got our current name: Linaro.

Total change… From embedded devices to ‘Yes, it is ARM. So what?’ kind as we support(ed) devices powerful enough to run normal desktop software. Many changes for me — from OpenEmbedded where you can (cross) build everything in few hours to Ubuntu packaging where sending package for inclusion into archive meant few hours of buildd queue and then few of build. But I learnt a lot here and met another set of hackers including grey beards ones ;)

And all that because I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 nine years ago…

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Nine years of embedded Linux was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

When I published my last post about ARM boards there were many questions and suggestions with interesting devices. Thank You all for it.

But there were also suggestions about ARM9 or ARM11 based devices. So I decided that it is good time to write what interest me now in ARM world.

But first some inventory. I had/used/have several devices with ARM cpu:

• StrongARM (armv4) one:

  • Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (which took me to ARM world)

• ARM920 (armv4t) ones:

  • Openmoko GTA01 bv3, bv4 (s3c2410)
  • EDB9301 (EP9301 cpu)
  • Sim-One (EP9307)

• ARM926 (armv5te) ones:

  • Sharp Zaurus sl-5600 (pxa250)
  • Sharp Zaurus c760/sl-6000 (pxa255)
  • Sharp Zaurus sl-c3000 (pxa272)
  • Sheevaplug (kirkwood)
  • Atmel devboards (at91sam9263, at91sam9m10)
  • ST-Microelectronics/ST-Ericsson NDK-15, NHK-15 (st88n15)
  • Nokia 770 (omap1710)
  • Linksys NSLU2 (ixp425 iirc)

• ARM1136 (armv6) ones:

  • Nokia N810 (omap2430)
  • Bug r1.0, r1.2 (i.mx31)

• Cortex-A8 (armv7a) ones:

  • Beagleboard B7, B7, C3 (omap3430)
  • Nokia N900 (omap3430)
  • Nexus S (exynos3)
  • Genesi Efika MX Smartbook (i.mx51)
  • Freescale Quickstart (i.mx53)

• Cortex-A9 (armv7a) ones:

  • Pandaboard EA1, A1 (omap4430)
  • Archos G9 80 (omap4430)

All of that during last 8 years. Most of my ARM live so far was around ARM926 based devices (some of them still can not be listed here) and I do not want to go there again. Kirkwood core was fastest one with 1.2GHz clock and 512MB of RAM it was really fast machine. I only missed Serial ATA in my Sheevaplug (rev 1.0) but even with hard drive on USB it was nice improvement.

Then I played a bit with ARM11 processors. Ok, they were faster than most of ARM9 cpus but I already had experience with Sheevaplug. And after few months first Cortex-a8 board landed on my desk — I got Beagleboard B7 from Bug labs as test platform for their new device. This was improvement!

I still remember my reaction when connected it to normal LCD monitor and saw it used at 720p resolution (1680×1050 was a bit hard for omap3). Moved to Nokia N900 few months later and found that fast cpu means nothing when paired with slow storage and not enough memory for system.

So today I prefer to not look below Cortex-A9 (or comparable cores like ones from Qualcomm or Marvell). Hope to play one day with Cortex-A5 (which should replace ARM926 one day) just to see how low-end armv7a cpu behave.

And wait for ARMv8 to hit market.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
What interest me in ARM world was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

We’ve recently deployed two features that make it easier to find bugs that you’re previously said affect you:

1: On your personal bugs page, there’s now an Affecting bugs that shows all these bugs.

2: On a project, distribution or source package bug listing page, there’s now a “Bugs affecting me” filter on the right (for example, bugs affecting you in the Launchpad product).

Counts of the number of affected users already help developers know which bugs are most urgent to fix, both directly and by feeding into Launchpad’s bug heat heuristic. With these changes, the “affects me” feature will also make it easier for you to keep an eye on these bugs, without having to subscribe to all mail from them.

Every day just about everyone at Canonical gets email by the bucket load. Even someone like me who’s only peripherally involved in desktop development and files his own bugs through the release cycle can get get hundreds of emails from Launchpad every day. So it made our day to get a letter like this from Neil in Monroeville.

In his letter Neil says he’s been using Ubuntu since 8.10, praises Unity and also files a bug he’s experiencing with the launcher in 11.04!

Neil, you don’t give us an email address but if you read this I’ve triaged your bug, marked it as confirmed and will be sending you a CD in the post which I hope will fix your problem Drop us an email if you can!

Pywin32 is a very cool project that allows you to access the win api without having to go through ctypes and deal with all the crazy parameters that COM is famous for. Unfortunately sometimes it has som issues which you face only a few times in your life.

This case I found a bug where GetFileSecurity does not use the GetFileSecurityW method but the w-less version. For those who don’t have to deal with this terrible details, the W usually means that the functions knows how to deal with utf-8 strings (backward compatibility can be a problem sometimes). I have reported the bug but for those that are in a hurry here is the patch:

diff -r 7dce71d174a9 win32/src/win32security.i
--- a/win32/src/win32security.i	Sat Jun 18 10:16:06 2011 -0400
+++ b/win32/src/win32security.i	Mon Jun 20 14:15:27 2011 +0200
@@ -2108,7 +2108,7 @@
  if (!PyWinObject_AsTCHAR(obFname, &fname))
   goto done;
 
-	if (GetFileSecurity(fname, info, psd, dwSize, &dwSize)) {
+	if (GetFileSecurityW(fname, info, psd, dwSize, &dwSize)) {
   PyErr_SetString(PyExc_RuntimeError, "Can't query for SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR size info?");
   goto done;
  }
@@ -2117,7 +2117,7 @@
   PyErr_SetString(PyExc_MemoryError, "allocating SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR");
   goto done;
  }
- if (!GetFileSecurity(fname, info, psd, dwSize, &dwSize)) {
+ if (!GetFileSecurityW(fname, info, psd, dwSize, &dwSize)) {
   PyWin_SetAPIError("GetFileSecurity");
   goto done;
  }
@@ -2153,7 +2153,7 @@
  PSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR psd;
  if (!PyWinObject_AsSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR(obsd, &psd))
   goto done;
-	if (!SetFileSecurity(fname, info, psd)) {
+	if (!SetFileSecurityW(fname, info, psd)) {
   PyWin_SetAPIError("SetFileSecurity");
   goto done;
  }

A short headsup about an upcoming change.

A very long time ago the team owner was always a team member. This was changed to make team owners optionally members (sometime before 2008!). However the change was incomplete – there has been an inconsistency in the codebase ever since. For the details see bug 227494.

I wanted to let everyone know about us actually finishing this change though, because for a small number of teams (about 400) their administrators may be surprised when they cannot do things.

The inconsistency was this: if a team owner leaves the team, so they just own it, then they are not listed as a team member. But if they try to exercise a privilege the team grants – e.g. if the team is a bug supervisor – the team owners were able to do this. This setup made it impossible for users to accurately determine who can carry out the responsibilities of a team : the Launchpad web UI incorrectly reported team members.

The fix which will be deployed in the next day or so corrects this inconsistency: Team ownership will no longer grant access to anything that team membership grants.

For clarity, these are the rules around team owners:

1. When a team owner is assigned (or a team made) the owner defaults to being an administrator-member.
2. If a team owner deactivates their team membership then they are not considered a team member anymore: resources and access that team membership grants will not be available to the owner at this point.
3. Team owners can always perform adminstrative tasks on the team: creating new administrators, edit the team description, rename the team etc.
4. Point 3 allows an owner to add themself to the team they own even if they deactivated their membership previously.

We have a small quandry on the Launchpad development team at the moment. As bug 268508 discusses, when one searches for a bug on Launchpad we do a substring search on the names of bug targets.

For instance, searching in Ubuntu for ‘gcc’ will return all bugs on the packages ‘gcc’, ‘gcc-4.4′, ‘gcc-4.3′, ‘gcc-3.3′ and so forth. Likewise search for bugs in a project group will do a similar substring search on each of the individual projects in the project group.

It turns out that doing this search is itself expensive. I asked on the Ubuntu devel list about turning it off. We would close bug 268508 and also significantly improve search performance.

However this is a possibly contentious change – there was one mail strongly in favour of the current behaviour – so I’d like to get this change proposed to a wider community.

If you’ve got a strong opinion – that the current behaviour is good, or like bug  268508 describes, that its a poor behaviour and we would be better off without it, then I’d love to hear from you. Just leave a comment on this post, drop me an email – robert at canonical.com – or post to the launchpad-users mailing list.

Thanks,
Rob (LP technical architect)

It was 24th March 2010 when one friend asked me do I want to be added to beta testers list for new omap hardware. One of questions was “what would you like to have on board” so I replied:

• hdmi out (does not care much about vga/svideo/composite out)
• 2xSD slots (SD or microsd type)
• ethernet (but rather not on usb)
• serial on db9/icd10 + serial/jtag by miniusb (think sheevaplug)
• OTG is not needed but can be present
• BT would be nice but not required as I have 5 micro dongles here
• few usb ports — if possible (not omap3530) on more then one hub
• few leds (multicolor?) would be nice (bug 2.0 has 2xblue + 2xmulticolor)
• few buttons including power/reset ones
• and 5V 2.1/2.5mm power jack. I do not need power-on-otg because it require 500mA ports
• onboard lcd+ts is not needed for me
• ah… and mounting holes like in beagleboard so board can be mounted anywhere
• connector with i2c/spi/gpio/etc/etc
• I missed audio in/out
• battery for rtc

And suggested to place most of connectors on 2 edges as it helps to organize desk. Atmel’s at91sam9m10 was given as example cause it has all connectors on top and left edge.

And time passed… At UDS-M TI people said that there will be cheap OMAP4 based board named PandaBoard. During dinner (later same day) I got added second time to early adopters list. I wonder how Rob Clark reacted when he saw me on a list already :D

And again time passed… Ubuntu/ARM people were playing with prototypes of PandaBoard (ES1.0, ES2.0 6-layer etc) and I had occasion to play with boards during Ubuntu/Linaro platform sprint in Prague. It looked nice (if you did not looked at ES1.0 one) and was more or less working fine.

And finally at 15th September I was told that at the end of month there will be production run from which several boards will be shipped to early adopters and few selected projects. Board travelled half of the world, then got back to US and at the end of UDS-N I got it.

Arrived home, powered BeagleBoard C3 off and started to assemble new board. Panda got several accessories connected:

• +5V 3.5A power supply
• powered USB hub
• small USB keyboard
• wireless USB mouse
• 20″ LCD monitor with 1680x1050px resolution (this is also connected to my desktop)
• 320GB Serial-ATA hard drive in SATA->USB enclosure

Also connected Ethernet, serial (by usb-serial dongle + 2 usb extenders) and used one of floating SD cards to have place for bootloaders and kernel. Config is much nicer then it was when I used BeagleBoard.

As operating system I am using Ubuntu 11.04 ‘natty’ as this is current development version and I have some things to check under it. Anyway I plan to move backwards and install 10.10 ‘maverick’ as primary system cause this will allow me to test omap4 hardware acceleration of graphics and audio/video decoding.

What I am using it for? Package building and testing. So far rebuilt whole KDE4 but it was segfaulting all the time on EfikaMX Smartbook so I am waiting for official ones (as there are some things to fix there first).

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
PandaBoard: my story was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Related posts:

1. BeagleBoard in a box
2. How many serial ports are enough?
3. My expansion board for BeagleBoard

It was known since previous UDS that there will be OMAP4 based PandaBoard available for developers. And some time ago pandaboard.org was started (for now with temporary website). Boards are still not available at distributors but there are some of them in different projects (like Ubuntu/ARM), some are on a way to new users (mine for example).

When final price was announced many people said that PandaBoard is BeagleBoard XM killer due to same (179USD) price. But is it? Let have a look.

First group of users for such boards are software developers. If they do not work for hardware companies then usually want to get more power for same price. So they will choose PandaBoard.

Second group would be companies which want to produce own hardware based on OMAP3/4. Here it depends on how soon OMAP4 chips will be available in small orders. As OMAP3 can be bought now and BBXM is available to buy many will choose it as this allow to get own hardware ready to market in less then year with having working platform for own developers so final device will start with ready software. One of such is BUG 2.0 which I used at prototype phase. It was designed after using BeagleBoards with BUGBoard extension as base for hardware development.

And Beagleboard XM is available to buy today — with fast CPU, 512MB ram, Ethernet, few USB ports it is big update to previous versions. I never used it — BB C3 is still my primary ARM development system. But in 2-3 weeks situation will change and BB will meet another C3 and one B7 versions in a box due to arrival of PandaBoard.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
PandaBoard: Beagleboard XM killer? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Related posts:

1. PandaBoard: my story
2. UDS continues
3. OMG! (aka BeagleBoard + LCD)

I have been working for about 2 moths now and after releasing our internal alpha release I have found a very interesting bug. In our port to windows we have decided to try and make your live as nice as possible in an environment as rough as Windows and to do so we allow our port to auto-update to always deliver the latests bug fixes.

Ofcourse to ensure that we are updating you system with the correct data we always perform a check sum of the msi. While our msi is updating to S3 using python, the code that downloads it is C#. Here are the different codes to calcualte the checksum:

    fd = open(filename,'r')
    md5_hash = hashlib.md5(fd.read()).hexdigest()

private static string Checksum(AlgoirhtmsEnum algorithm, string filePath)
        {
            HashAlgorithm hash;
            switch (algorithm)
            {
                case AlgoirhtmsEnum.SHA1:
                    hash = new SHA1Managed();
                    break;
                case AlgoirhtmsEnum.SHA256:
                    hash = new SHA256Managed();
                    break;
                case AlgoirhtmsEnum.SHA384:
                    hash = new SHA384Managed();
                    break;
                case AlgoirhtmsEnum.SHA512:
                    hash = new SHA512Managed();
                    break;
                default:
                    hash = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
                    break;
 
            }
            var checksum = "";
            using (var stream = new FileStream(filePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
            {
                var md5 = hash.ComputeHash(stream);
                for (var i = 0; i < md5.Length; i++)
                {
                    checksum += md5[i].ToString("x2").ToLower();
                }
            }
            return checksum;
        }

Believe it or not the hash returned by each piece of code was different. WTF!!!! After a ridiculous time looking at it I managed to spot the issue. If you are using python on windows, unless you use the b option when opening a file, python will convert all the CRLF to LF making the hash to be different, how to fixed this? simply open the file this way:

fd = open(filename,'rb')

Go an figure….