Somewhere in 2010/11 I decided to clean up mess of naming machines at home and decided to go with character names from “Winnie the Pooh” books (Polish edition). Today I got new developer board and had to spend a moment to get a name for it.

So “klapouchy” (Eyeore) will be new name for DragonBoard. Maybe not best one but most of the names are already taken:

• krzys (Christopher Robin) is my router (because Chris decides who can enter Hundred Acre Wood which is the name of my WiFi network)
• puchatek (Winnie the Pooh) is main desktop
• lumpek (Lumpy) is conference laptop (it was lucek before because it got Ubuntu Lucid as first system)
• gofer (Gopher) is Efika MX Smartbook
• krolik (Rabbit) is Samsung Chromebook
• malenstwo (Roo) is Pandaboard (there were malenstwo-a1 and malenstwo-ea1 when I had two boards)
• prosiaczek (Piglet) was MX53 Quickstart
• kangurzyca (Kanga) is my wife laptop (she chosen the name)
• sowa (Owl) is another router
• tygrysek (Tigger) is my VPS (at beginning it was up/down/up/down all the time)

So most of the names from books are already taken. There are also Disney movies which adds few new ones (like Gopher and Lumpy) and cartoons (which I am not fan of). In worst case one day I will start re-using names or add names from other story.

What I used before? Desktop was “home” or “hrw”, Dell laptop (now “kangurzyca”) was “maluch” (small) due to 12″ size, “lumpek” was “lucek” due to Ubuntu Lucid installed and rest was named by hardware name (which is a default in OpenEmbedded).

How you are naming your machines?

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I am running out of names for computers 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

Please people… stop asking me about Raspberry/Pi. I do not want it, do not plan to buy one (when they will be finally available for normal people) and for sure do not plan to support it.

Raspberry/Pi may look as interesting hardware to you but it does not have to mean same to others. Want to run desktop? 256MB of memory means really crippled one (last time I saw this amount of RAM in desktop computer right before opening it to add 512MB stick). Sure, for 25-35 USD it is proper range as memory is probably the most expensive part. Device may be good for using it in more embedded environment where GPIO/I²C/I²S/SPI/UART matter — expansion connector provides those signals.

But I would rather buy BeagleBone to play with peripherials connected to such pins. Someone may ask “why? it is more expensive”. Reason is simple — it is in production, already has expansions which adds things like video output, touchscreens. And it has ARMv7 cpu which allows me to run any ARM distribution available today — so Debian ‘armel/armhf’, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ångström (which is preinstalled with great IDE to play with device already) or anything other.

I do not need small device which can run XMBC or Quake — have private PandaBoard which can do that too and has few things more than Raspberry/Pi.

And I do not think that companies which do software should start working on <100USD hardware like article at Techblaze suggests.

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I am tired of Raspberry/Pi was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

So called ‘low cost’ developer boards (like BeagleBoard xM, PandaBoard, Snowball, MX53 Quick Start) do not have NAND flash on them so people are using SD/MMC cards as boot media and storage. So we, developers, went to shops and bought SD cards. Some got class4 ones cause budget was low already, some grabbed class10 ones hoping that they will be fast, other took class6.

I got some 4GB Transcend class10 ones. They worked, gave me 15MB/s on read and were fine. Until recently they started giving strange kernel output, MMC timeouts, I/O errors which resulted in filesystem going into read only mode. As I prefer to have working board then wondering how much time it will survive I trashed both cards. Good that I had some spare unknown 8GB microSD ones. But in last ~year I had to throw away 4 SD cards…

One of solution for it is moving rootfs to some more reliable storage. I did that with MX53 Quick Start — it has 320GB Serial-ATA harddrive connected. So for PandaBoards I could use 8-16GB thumb drives or USB connected hard drives. I had this in past when there was no mx53 hardware at my desk. But this means extra costs, additional cables, probably even another set of power cables…

Will have to check market for good reliable SD cards soon. 8-16GB ones so there will be space available for doing builds. Or will switch to old school NFS root which requires only 64MB cards — just to load bootloader, kernel, initrd. Other option is a network storage like NBD, AoE or iSCSI but this requires more configuration.

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SD cards die was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some time ago I got yet another developer board from Linaro — this time it was i.mx53 Quickstart also known as mx53 LOCO. At that time I only found time to power it on and check does it work at all.

Yesterday I booted it with Ubuntu desktop image from Linaro but without connecting to display (I have HDMI addon so can use VGA and HDMI outputs). Lot of lights (voltage controls mostly) appeared on board — funny thing is that to power some of them all you need is VGA or HDMI cable connected.

Today I went shopping… Board comes with power supply (did not used), USB cable and 8GB microSD card. Last item is important as mx53loco boots from it by default — I do not know does it checks SD card too. What I lacked was Serial ATA -> E-SATA cable for my external hard drive. Yes… SATA->ESATA as board has standard connector for connecting drives directly but as it lacks SATA power connector (about which I wrote already) I had to use external case. Good thing is that local electronics shop had those cables available. Disk speed is quite nice:

Serial ATA disk speed

Same disk on USB

Compare it with SD card:

SD card speed

Which interface you prefer for storage? :) I hope that new Efika MX53 from Genesi will have some good Serial ATA storage inside.

But then I got hit by other issue… Mounting of board started to be a problem. I hope that next version of board will be bigger. This one is too packed — and HDMI addon makes it even worse at it adds 5th edge to square board. In past I wrote a post about perfect developer board and some points apply here. What I do not like:

• too small amount of space around mounting holes — hard to reach with 5mm key
• VGA and RS232 connectors forced me to use very tiny screws to be able to mount board to my board plate
• Power button is hidden behind screw and hard to reach
• HDMI addon makes use of Reset and Power buttons very hard — have to use pen or stylus instead of finger when cable is connected
• leds are too bright — will have to put some duct tape on them

Is there something I like? Of course — I do not want to only complain ;) This is the only cheap developer board from Linaro supported ones with native Serial ATA interface (iirc Samsung cpu could have it but Origenboard does not have connector). Two SD interfaces allow to prototype devices which require extra expansions in case of Beagleboard or Pandaboard. And this is smallest devboard I ever used (cause I never played with Gumstix — but even they usually run in some carrier boards). And compare to Texas Instruments boards it comes with cables and power supply. I plan to make small distcc/icecream farm from my ARM boards and this one will be for use one of nodes.

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Square board with five edges was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

When I returned from Linaro Connect Q3.11 I noticed that none of my Pandaboards are on. I though that powered them off before leaving but two days later I needed at least one online. Power cycling PSU did not helped so I took 5V/3A one from box and got board running leaving old one for inspection later.

Today I disconnected all cables from PSU and opened it:

This does not look good… So time to buy another 100-200W old pc power supply and adapt for use with developer boards:

This big white connector had 12V, GND, 5V lines which allowed me to charge most of my developer boards and usb hubs.

It served well for 2.5 years — now have to recycle it…

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
My devboards lost power source was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

As I did not had a mood to blog during event I decided to write something about after it ended.

First what this Linaro Connect is about… Is it conference or rather an event which has to gather people in one place so they can reach each other easily? From what I saw during last week it is both.

There were several summits which I did not attended so does not have anything to write about them. Inter team meetings during which people were sharing their knowledge about their work and how to use it to improve work of other teams — here the most active were Android and Validation teams (in my opinion). Schedule was full of Android sessions and LAVA was quite often heard word.

For me event started on Sunday as I had taxi at 6:30 in the morning. Then bus, plane and then waiting 2h in terminal 1 of London Heathrow airport waiting for few other guys to appear as we had to share a cab to hotel where I arrived at ~17:00 local time. Yes, my travels sucks.

Went outside with Zygmunt Krynicki to find some place to eat. Found few takeaway only places and small restaurant with India food which was delicious.

Monday started with traditional English breakfast (you know: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, baked beans and mushrooms kind of one) which was quite good and we had it daily. When it comes to food at hotel it was good and someone had great idea serving different cuisine each day.

Starting plenary with informations from each team about what do they plan for this week. Then work, meetings, coding, hacking etc. Attended several meetings like binary toolchain discussion with toolchain working group, Matthias Klose from Ubuntu and several people from ARM Ltd which maintain ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5). Also went for hard float summit with not only Linaro or Ubuntu but also Fedora and Marvell people.

But work is not the only thing we did. There were activities for evenings too.

On Monday we went outside for karting. First we were equipped with proper suit, shoes, helmet and then went for safety instructions.

Racing was fun. Each team were split into two sub teams (as there were two tracks) with 4 people in each. That gave 15 minutes per person, but as one of us decided to not drive second one we had 20 minutes on it.

Was it fun? O yes, it was. Especially outside track where speed was higher and engine more powerful but as steering was tough my right wrist reminded me that RSI problem which I had few years ago (this time pain vanished during night but got back at closing party). Our team took 6th place in total.

Tuesday and Wednesday evenings were “reserved” for team meals. First day we went to Browns and Punter was next one. Food in both was tasty and came in big amounts.

But food was not the only way to spend evening. On Wednesday we went punting on a river in Cambridge. Our punter was presenting us with informations about colleges and bridges we were passing by — things like who created them, when, why etc. Some people took photos but so far I did not traced whom to contact to get a copy.

Thursday we had a dinner in King’s College. Dinning hall looked nice with all those portraits and food was good. Had a nice talk with ST-Ericsson people about their cheap developer board Snowball which I complained about in other post. We got to the point that the CPU on board was created for mobile devices use (that’s why no usb host functionality) and that all those industrial connectors are present because it is more board for prototyping new devices.

Friday was last day. We did some hacking, packed equipment of our room and prepared for closing plenary. At the end we had small party with some activities and food. I left it early — was tired and wanted to discuss with Zygmunt a bit (normally we chat often during company events but this time we got separate rooms).

Return trip was a copy… taxi, plane, bus, taxi. Went home around 22:00 and gave inflated sword (from closing party) to my daughter — she liked it ;)

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Linaro Connect Q3.11 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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I own several developer boards and used many others. During last two years more and more so called cheap developer boards arrived on market but are they good or not?

This week I am at Linaro Connect Q3.11 now and there are many boxes here with Origen boards so I looked at one of them.

Board looks quite nice — there is CPU module and carrier board. 2 SD/MMC slots, serial, jtag, usb device, usb host (just one), power, audio in/out, lcd connector, few keys and microHDMI (cable to normal HDMI provided). Guess what is missing… Yes, they forgot to put Ethernet on board. Someone may say “but there is WiFi instead” but show me wireless operating at 100Mbps in all situations… I also got information that provided HDMI cable is quite fragile and can break. Normal size video output would fit without problems…

But board design problems are not limited to Samsung one. There is this nice i.mx53 Quick Start board from Freescale. You get VGA output and several other connectors. Nice change compared to other boards is SATA connector. But this also can be a problem cause you have to provide separate power for your Serial-ATA device. HDMI output (with audio) costs extra 49 USD but as this board is really small (3×3″) there was no space for it.

Next one? ST-Ericsson Snowball – board with lot of connectors with huge amount of different signals but without USB host ports. There is one USB OTG port and one USB device. Is USB host cable provided? No, it costs 8.04EUR more. What worries me is lack of USB signals in expansion slots (at least thats how I understood documentation). CPU for mobile phones^Wdevices only?

What we left? PandaBoard from Texas Instruments. I think that this is still best cheap developer board when it comes to ARMv7 cpus. It is not perfect (slow USB, lack of SATA) but things supported by OMAP4 processor are available. Ethernet is on USB but better such then none, 4 USB ports (2 on edge, 2 on expansion) and normal HDMI connectors for video.

Note that I do not compare speed of boards or how good/bad they are supported in mainline kernel — some of those things can not be compared, other are changing daily. For now I am staying with 2 Pandaboards and will wait for other boards to get up to it with kernel support.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
What is wrong with all those cheap developer boards? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Last week there was Ubuntu platform sprint in Dublin, Ireland. I was there as one of invited Linaro guys (we got own room). What for we went there?

Work. Simple word but so much content in it. Sprints like this one allow to cooperate with other developers and this time I spent some time with Ubuntu ARM, Foundations and Kernel teams. But most of time I spent with Linaro guys as we had release of 11.06 to do.

My part was building cross toolchains for Ubuntu — including few already released ones. So I pushed several updates to ‘oneiric’, ‘natty’, ‘maverick’ and ‘lucid’ versions:

• binutils 2.21.52.20110606-1ubuntu1
• gcc 4.4.6-3ubuntu1
• gcc 4.5.3-1ubuntu2
• gcc 4.6.0-14ubuntu1
• eglibc 2.13-6ubuntu2
• linux 3.0-1.2

If you are running 11.10 ‘oneiric’ then all you need is just apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabi and will get cross compiler. For “armhf” compatible one apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf needs to be used. For those which run older releases there is Linaro toolchain backport PPA where packages are available for “amd64″ and “i386″ architectures.

Other part of my work was related with Star rating system which we plan to use to show status of boards supported by Linaro. I did some tests with PandaBoard connected to two monitors at same time and reported several bugs. Situation is nice but many things still need work.

At one moment I was creating “lucid” chroot on my “oneiric” system to be able to compile toolchain. And then I got a problem which ended in bug 802985 which needs fixing in all supported releases… Also debootstrap needs to be expanded to handle multiple suites at one time — otherwise there will be no way to populate chroots with older releases on any machine running 3.x kernels.

But work is not the only thing which we spent time on. Evenings were usually in pubs or similar places.

On Monday I went to hotel bar, grabbed a beer and started discussing with some random people. At one moment (when we were talking about OpenZaurus) one of them asked who I am and then went and bought me beer — he was Zaurus user whom I helped in past ;) So never know who you can meet…

As I have few friends in Dublin area I contacted them and on Wednesday evening I went with one of them to Club Chonradh na Gaeilge Irish pub where speaking English is nearly forbidden (but we were using Polish so no problems :). There was one bard singing Irish songs. Nice place, nice event.

Thursday was team dinner — went to Rustic Stone. Nice place, awesome food:

Friday was a day when many of us started packing and some even left earlier to catch flights. As Wookey asked me week before sprint to take my N900 with me we made a deal and I got some Euros and he got phone with all accessories. So guys — now really no more Maemo support from me (not that I did anything in this area since move to Nexus S).

On Friday also other part of visit started for me — my wife Ania arrived and we went to our family to spend nice weekend in Ireland.

We drove to Howth, spent some time looking at area from highest(?) mountain:

Then beach in Portmarnock where my wife started collecting sea shells… Quickly we got lot of them but I managed to put them in luggage somehow ;)

Evening was funny as we had to meet with one of my old friends. The “problem” was that we never met in real life yet and I forgot how does he looks. When I told that to wife and rest of group they were really surprised that such thing can happen ;D But we found each other and went to the Church Bar which is made from old St. Mary’s Church of Ireland which is one of the earliest examples of a galleried church in Dublin. Built at the beginning of the 18th century and renovated in 21st century. Nice place to visit in Dublin.

On Sunday we went into Wiclow county. Upper Lake at Glendalough then Glenmacnass Waterfall and few stops during trip to watch landscapes:

Monday was different — we went to Dublin for normal sight-seeing. You know: buildings, churches, castle…

Then packed bags and went to airport. The good part of Aer Lingus is that there were no problems with checking-in two bags on my ticket (but queue to just drop bags was insanely long). 2h flight, then another 2h in a bus and we finally arrived home. This part of conferences trip I like most — arrival at destination (as in Europe trips can take even 9h for me).

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Dublin: Ubuntu sprint and more was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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As discussed at last months Ubuntu Developer Summit in the session ‘ARM and other architectures certification program‘, there’s a plan to start certifying ARM hardware, or at least start investigating how we’ll do it. To this end I’ve received on loan a TI OMAP4 Pandaboard from Canonical’s ARM QA team. I’ve actually had it here in the office for quite a few weeks now but for some reason or another I haven’t got around to blogging about it yet!

So, without further adieu – here are a couple of shots of my setup:

I like it because it’s really compact and smacks of geekiness, with all the exposed circuits, yet is really quite easy to use in a lot of ways. The monitor is plugged in via the HDMI port on the right hand side (because of an issue with my monitor I can only get 640×480 out of it, so everything is very squeezed on the screen) and the wireless desktop receiver which handles my mouse and keyboard plugs right in to one of the two full sized USB 2.0 ports. The whole thing is powered by my laptop (even when it’s suspended) via USB-AC 5v connector, also on the right-hand side.

It’s running Natty/Unity 2D installed on the 8GB SDHC card on the left of the board. This means that the whole setup cost (if I had have payed for rather than borrowed it) just under $200. The white labeled chip on the top left hand side of the board is the WiFi/Bluetooth chip and that works *perfectly* out of the box – often picking up a better signal than the laptop sitting right next to it. I also have the option of plugging in my USB headset in the the same USB hub as the wireless receiver (it’s a tight squeeze but it just about fits) and that too works perfectly.

Cons are that I don’t have a USB HDD so Ubuntu is running on flash memory (notoriously bad performance) and that if I decide to power down my laptop but forget the Pandaboard has some task running on it then all is lost Overall though it’s a really nice piece of equipment and because of all the good work that has been done around it, I could recommend one to anyone with a bit of technical know-how (no ARM experience required!)

Before UDS-O I decided that it is a time to change organization of my desk. Current setup is effect of two years of using several boards/computers etc.

Today I went on desk and under it and started disconnecting all cables which are no longer in use:

• 3 null modem serial cables
• 3 USB extenders
• ATX 200W psu modded to provide 5V/12V for developer boards
• E-SATA cable used with USB/ESATA hdd enclosure which is now connected over USB to PandaBoard
• 3 Ethernet cables
• mini-USB cable used as serial console with SheevaPlug
• VGA cable which was used with second LCD — will be reconnected when there will be time for desktop

But that’s just beginning. Next days will bring disconnecting all developer boards, moving cable modem and phone base near to router, mounting two PandaBoards on piece of MDF (so they will not float), mounting some extra shelves to get rid of stuff from desk.

At the end I plan to have 2-4 LCD panels (or 2 monitors + 4-port KVM switch), two keyboards, two mouses, two laptops on one desk. Hope to finish it before end of next week.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Reorganization of desk: day 1 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Related posts:

1. What is wrong with all those cheap developer boards?
2. PandaBoard: my story
3. Today is GPRS day

This week I am in Budapest, Hungary attending Ubuntu Developer Summit for 11.10 ‘oneiric’ release discussions. But this is not only Ubuntu — there is huge amount of Linaro people discussing what to do next cycle.

Sunday

Travel, travel, travel… Usual way — bus from home to Berlin airport (SXF this time) where I met with Henning ‘woglinde’ Heinold to donate my old Linksys WRT54 which I got donated few years ago to be able to use my Zauruses wireless. Router had to be in use on OpenEmbedded stand at LinuxTag, Berlin — go there and visit them at booth 7.2b 112.

Again flight was with Easyjet. It is cheap airline but with speedy boarding it is good enough to go with. Bad side is that it lands at old terminal 1 in Budapest so I had to go to hotel by my own.

Evening was Canonical only meeting where there was a presentation of some things which will go into 11.10 Ubuntu release (nearly same to next day keynote). After food, discussions and finally sleep ;D

Monday

Sessions started — I attended few:

• Ubuntu LEB documentation
• cross toolchain user stories — my own session where most of time Micheal Hope was telling us about requests which Toolchain WG got
• user stories for nano image
• DMB regular meeting — I became Ubuntu developer during it!

During evening was ‘Meet & Greet’ social event sponsored by Openstack and Freescale. Nice way to catch with people. Especially when you meet old friends which you never met in person ;D I met Marek Szyprowski which whom I was writing to Polish Amiga paper magazine named ‘eXec’ (but website with similar name does not have nothing in common now). We talked for quite long time about misc things. Also met some other folks, refreshed faces memory etc.

Tuesday

Sessions:

• cross toolchain user stories (again) — we discussed notes from previous day, decided on some details and created work items so I can start working on it
• Ubuntu LEB documentation (also again)
• Linaro Ubuntu LEB process for 11.11
• GDB as cross debugger

As you see LEB was topic of a day. And it was not everything — next day was another session.

Evening was taken by The Linaro Technical Showcase sponsored by IBM. What was there? Many interesting things:

• Arnd Bergmann was talking why class4 SD card can be much better then class10 one
• Freescale Landing Team was presenting i.mx53 Quick Start boards
• Ash Charles from Gumstix was presenting their new miniboards with DM37xx cpus and few carrier boards
• Pawe? Moll from ARM was presenting Cortex A15 running from two biggest FPGA chips. It had just 11MHz clock but it was enough to show Doom game running on connected monitor.
• Oxlab guys shown their work on Android and how you can hibernate BeagleBoard
• ST-Ericsson guys presented Snowball boards — we had a talk on some hardware details
• Konstantinos Margaritis shown what kind of difference can be between armel and armhf ports on same hardware
• Angus Ainslie presented Samsung developer board and we had interesting discussion about it

I do not remember all presentations — those ones interested me most. ARM one was amazing — huge FPGAs which were able to emulate A15, A5, A9 just by booting with different MicroSD card… And it is not related only to CPU emulation cause there were two expansion slots on mainboard so FPGAs can became graphics card with Mali core flashed into. Second board was ‘simple’ A9 with Mali and some OpenGL(ES) demo was running there.

And again — new faces to join with names. Talked with Ash Charles about discussions in past when I helped Gumstix developers with OpenEmbedded, Angus Ainslie from ST-Ericsson was working for Openmoko at time when we had cooperation and so on…

Wednesday

Woke up early… What to do after 6:10? Go swimming! So I went to Royal SPA and spent some time in swimming pool and sauna so day started nicely.

Sessions:

• automated cross-buildd system/service
• Ubuntu LEB Star Rating documentation — my session again on how we want to rate level of support of member boards
• ARM Linus interface 3 — attended just to check how kernel developers are discussing how to improve arch/arm/ situation

Met Mark Brown with whom I was working in OpenEmbedded project and after lunch I went to do some sight seeing with Pawe? Moll. Budapest is nice city and I have to came back here one day.

Team dinner somewhere in the city was quite good. We had a fun going back to hotel when ~half of us used phones to navigate though city ;D

Thursday

Sessions:

• arm and other archs certification program — Canonical has certification program of machines which came with Ubuntu pre-installed. I have to check at their tools.
• ALIP mini-distro and build system user/developer stories — interesting discussion
• cross-toolchains for the ARM hard-float ABI — will have to provide them for Ubuntu and other but it is doable
• next steps with multiarch in Ubuntu — where do we go and how

Evening was sight seeing with local guides. We saw parlament building, chain bridge, castle area and ended in interesting pub.

Friday

Ending day and nearly no sessions today:

• port to the ARM hard-float ABI — Ubuntu armhf someone?
• Linaro Review of LDS week
• easier access to -dbgsym packages

Some of people already packed and left, rest will go to have fun at UDS party.

Summary

It was my third UDS and I feel that it was best one. I had two blueprints to handle and both had great discussions which ended in many notes and work items. There was lot of people both from Ubuntu community and Linaro teams. I met many developers, some old friends, went to so many sessions that it took me most of time (I do not remember is list in post is complete).

It was nice to see amount of ARM netbooks at people hands — mostly Genesi Smartbooks but also several Toshiba AC100 ones. I think that it shows that times are changing and who knows… maybe at next event I will not use my ASUS UL30A laptop.

And this is another UDS with some added hardware. This time it is Pandaboard A1 which can replace my EA1 at my work for Linaro. Probably will keep both running one to another but one (EA1) with Ubuntu and second (A1) will be used for misc tests.

Now it is a time to drop laptop in hotel room and go for party!!!

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
UDS-O was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Related posts:

1. Ubuntu/Linaro Platform Sprint in Prague
2. Trips in 2011
3. UDS-N: Monday

Some time ago someone at Linaro got nice idea and “Linaro porting jam” got created. But what it is?

Once per week (Wednesday 14:00 — 18:00 UTC) we gather on #linaro channel (Freenode) and work on Ubuntu bugs which affects ARM architecture. This week I reviewed some bugs on Tuesday and started working on fixes.

Effects? Few new uploads into Ubuntu archive:

• lxc was lacking ARM support
• ace has silly way of finding libraries which fails on multiarch systems
• svgalib does not build all binaries on every architecture but assumes that they are present
• llvm-snapshot got preprocessed source requested by toolchain WG guys from Linaro

I also tried few other packages but failed to find a way to get them fixed. For some I left comments in their bug reports.

Fixing bugs in packages which you do not use or even never heard before can be fun. Join us next week :)

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Linaro porting jam was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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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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Some time ago I got PandaBoard for my personal use. It is EA1 version but then there was a question which I heard countless times:

Which version of OMAP4430 did you got?

There are two possible answers: ES2.0 or ES2.1. During my return trip from UDS-N Nicolas Dechesne from TI asked me and instead of answering I just gave him board with “this one” answer. He looked and told “ES2.1″ and I did not asked more.

At home when I got it working I found PandaBoard Revisions wiki page which tells which GPIO lines should be checked. So I wrote simple test:

for gpio in 171 101 182;
do 
    cat /sys/class/gpio/gpio$gpio/value;
done

And got “0 1 1″ as an answer which according to table from wiki means “750-2152-010 (ES2.1, 8-layer board)-Production board/PandaBoard Rev. A1″. But sticker on mine says “750-2152-001 (D)” which (again according to table) means that I have “(ES2.0, 8-layer board)-Early Adopter Board/PandaBoard Rev. EA1″ one.

So who to believe? After some discussions on #pandaboard irc channel I prefer to trust Måns Rullgård and his skills in OMAP related area. He pointed me to OMAP4430 TRM section 1.5 which describes where version of silicon is written. What left was just one run of devmem2 tool:

root@localhost:~# devmem2 0x4A002204
/dev/mem opened.
Memory mapped at address 0x2aba9000.
Value at address 0x4A002204 (0x2aba9204): 0x1B85202F

And I got confirmation that I have real ES2.0 board. For those curious: ES2.1 has 0x3B95C02F value.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
How to detect PandaBoard version was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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3. UDS-N: Monday

Again early wake up… This time 4:44 but I think that today will be better then yesterday because 6h of sleep is often my default amount. Few minutes ago room mate woke up and said: you will never convert to this timezone if you will not sleep longer. But why do I have to? In few days I will be back home.

After “let’s do nothing” Sunday it is time to start doing UDS things. I have quite long list of sessions to attend and for few I will need to select which one to go:

Monday:

• 11:00 Linaro@UDS roundtable
• 12:00 Xdeb cross-compilation environment
• 15:00 Current state of Linaro toolchain
• 16:15 Package development tools
• 17:10 Future Linaro toolchain areas

Tuesday:

• 09:00 Toolchain consumption models
• 11:00 Design a safe and stable build cluster for public ARM PPAs based on the OMAP4 Pandaboard
• 11:00 Using QEMU for demonstrations
• 12:00 Integrate gdbserver support in Linaro
• 15:00 Kexec
• 16:15 Improve detection of device class at install time
• 16:15 Current and future GDB for ARM plans

Wednesday:

• 09:00 Create minimal preinstalled developer images
• 11:00 The Multi-Monitor User Experience multimedia
• 12:00 State of ARM developer tools
• 12:00 Kubuntu Natty and X.org
• 15:00 Provide ARM cross-compiler packages for Ubuntu Natty
• 16:15 Linaro toolchain integration in Ubuntu Natty
• 17:00 Cross-Compilation Environment

Thursday:

• 10:00 Git for Bzr users
• 11:00 Kernel version and flavours
• 11:00 Performance inside of GCC
• 12:00 ARM specific library tuning
• 15:00 Produce an image suitable for set-top boxes for armel

Friday:

• 09:00 Provide a Linaro image with a set of developer-oriented tools installed by default
• 10:00 More stable VM solution for running armel VMs
• 11:00 Multiarch Support for gcc, binutils, dpkg, and apt
• 12:00 Discuss the way forward with the 2D ARM netbook UI
• 15:00 Provide solutions for netbooting and minimally installed Thin Clients on ARM boards

For now this is a list of sessions which I will attend or consider to. Some of them are required for me, some I will lead, some are for curiosity and few I will attend to check what is going on and maybe provide some hints. Compared to UDS-M this one will be rather busy for me. And I have to catch Jamie to grab my PandaBoard from him :)

BTW — if you are interested in checking something on PandaBoard then catch me. Maybe it will be possible to organize some kind of hacking session (but note that I do not have any of required things for board — no psu, no cables/keyboard/mouse/etc).

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
UDS-N: Monday was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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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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