It took me a lot more than I expected, but I finally managed to get the beagleboard booting and happy with the latest linux kernel (2.6.32-rc3), DSS2, and dsp-bridge driver.

So codeswarm.rb has now been renamed to ripary and got some project hosting.

In order to celebrate I created a visualization of linux 2.6.31 development.

Here it is:

Next step is to figure out a way to render videos that don’t look so crappy on YouTube

The bug we are talking about is the infamous switchboard timeout error which was very elusive, it happened randomly, and very often for some users in unknown conditions. Essentially you send a message, and after one minute you receive a notification telling you the message never arrived, after which you need to resend the message, and hope it will arrive this time.

The next msn-pecan release started as 0.0.20 but there are so many changes that
it’s going to be 0.1.0. It is way more stable than 0.0.19 but we still would
like to do more extensive testing, so we are rolling a release candidate in
order to fix critical bugs that might be lingering. Hopefully it will be the
only release candidate before the actual release.

Hi,

Amazing talk: Charles Leadbeater: The rise of the amateur professional

These are my favorite quotes:

• How do we organize ourselves without organizations? … You don’t need an organization to be organized.
• One of the reasons [this view] is wrong, is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they’re often ahead of the producers.
• Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They’ve got so much sunk in it, that it’s very difficult for them to spot new markets. Emerging new markets then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users.
• What we are seeing is a complete corruption of the ideal of patents and copyrights; meant to be a way to incentivize innovation, meant to be a way orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge. They are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place.
• The reason why despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back… why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources, and one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers.

It took some time but finally tiopenmax 0.3.5 was released. It’s essentially 0.3 plus DSP binaries that actually work.

I verified with gst-openmax (git omap branch) and they work just fine Thanks Daniel Díaz!

So people with OMAP3 hardware (beagleboard) can already try D1 MPEG-4 decoding using less than 15% of CPU. If you missed the demo, here it is:

Update: the latest information is actually here.

All the information was available in my previous post. One minor update is that I’ve made a tag (v2.6.28-tidspbridge) to the linux-omap tree on my github repo to make it extra easy for people to compile a stable kernel with the dsp-bridge driver. There’s many DSP fixes available and some performance improvements which are not in this tag, but I’ll make sure they are once 2.6.29-omap1 is tagged.

Here is a video showing off gst-openmax on the beagleboard. It’s a 720×400 MPEG-4 video at 24 fps. Essentially gst-openmax is using TI’s OpenMAX IL implementation, which is using the DSP on the OMAP 3530 to decode the video. The CPU usage on the ARM side is about 10% which leaves plenty of room to decode audio [...]

Replying to Ari Jaaksi’s post. I believe that what open source has done for software development, agile methonds can do for commercial system and product development. Add visibility, access, and intellectual honesty. Transparency. You cannot hide shit no more. Indeed, Scrum brings more transparency to the software development in corporate environments, compared to the waterfall process. And [...]

Apparently there’s renewed discussion regarding Nokia’s support for Ogg Vorbis on the next platform. I can only comment on the technical side of things. We will be using the OMAP3 chip, which has an ARM Cortex A8 processor, which has NEON technology. This allows for many optimizations of multimedia software, so audio decoders can run on [...]