Mini6410 running an OpenEmbedded built GPE Image

The image pretty much illustrates what we are up to do now – but lets take a look at the software shipped with the board first. Compared to the older Mini2440 the devices official support DVD offers several more options: We have pre-compiled images based on Android, XUbuntu and Qtopia and an advanced U-Boot which comes with a kind of menu for the basic tasks.  One major problem is that currently the documentation is available in Chinese only which makes it a little bit hard to handle. But translating single paragraphs of the more than 300 pages long PDF manual using Google Translator worked pretty well. The DVD contains important sources for Android, U-Boot and Linux. The Kernel is based on 2.6.28 for the SMDK 6410 reference design and heavily patched. Some parts are quite far from mainline Linux and should be updated to latest standards – apart from the fact the whole Linux support might want some rebase on 2.6.35.

Now we have a big pile eh… DVD with stuff that runs on the board already – what does OpenEmbedded help us with here? Well all the binary stuff serves some purpose but nothing is perfect – OE helps us with to become more flexible and consistent at the same time. XUbuntu is great with its large package repository to try out things – but it has quite some requirements about flash storage, RAM and screen size. With OE you have the choice to create a full featured desktop image or to build something that fits your particular need.

So lets take a brief look into OE setup for the Mini6410 and how to install an image built with OE.

If you are new to this topic you should get familiar with OpenEmbedded first. The official getting started document is a good thing to read first. The following section assumes you have your OE set up and cares about the Mini6410 specific bits only. Make sure to use a recent org.openembedded.dev or testing branch.

First set up your local.conf to build for the Mini6410 – if you are using multiple configuration files then make sure to distribute these bits over the files correctly:

MACHINE = "mini6410"
DISTRO = "angstrom-2008.1"
LIBC = "eglibc"
GLIBC_GENERATE_LOCALES = "en_GB.UTF-8 de_DE.UTF-8 fr_FR.UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8"

This will select the Mini6410 as a target device, Ångström distribution and eglibc – this is the combination I tested. The last line defines a limited set of libc locales to be generated.

Now let’s build a filesystem image. I built a simple GPE based filesystem image first:

bitbake x11-gpe-image

If everything is configured correctly, your harddisk is large enough and your Internet connection ok you should get filesystem and kernel image in $TMPDIR/deploy/eglibc/images/mini6410. For the impatient of you or the ones who get bored during a build (no I don not suffer from this) I have uploaded my results here.

Finally lets go ahead an install these files into the internal NAND flash. I’m using U-Boot on the boards – we want to stay open and do not rely on propitiatory software. Keep this in mind if you intend to make a product: Any component you are not able to influence has potential to cause trouble and in most cases it will do this – sooner or later.

There are several ways to install files and to configure U-Boot. Here we use a quite generic solution using TFTP to transfer the images and fixed addresses. Not the best solution but the simplest. First if you do not have a DHCP server you have to configure networking:

setenv ipaddr <some IP for the board>
setenv serverip <your server's IP>

If you have a DHCP server you can skip this step and write “dhcp” instead of “tftp” in the commands below. These will download the files and install them into the internal NAND flash:

tftp 0xc0008000 uImage-mini6410.ubi
nand erase 0x80000 0x500000
nand write 0xc0008000 0x80000 0x500000

tftp 0xc0008000 x11-gpe-image-mini6410.ubi
nand erase 0x580000
nand write 0xc0008000 0x580000 ${filesize}

Finally we configure the boot parameters to match the installed kernel + filesystem and save these:

setenv bootargs console=ttySAC0,115200 ubi.mtd=2
   root=ubi0:rootfs-mini6410 rootfstype=ubifs
saveenv

(note that the first command needs to be entered in a single line)

We do not have to pass information about the MTD partition layout to the kernel since we follow the kernel’s built-in default in this configuration. Just reset your board and check if it boots into your shiny new filesystem. If something is wrong then please drop me a mail providing information (e.g. bootlog, screenshot, configuration files…). This could help to improve this little text and OpenEmbedded support for the Mini6410.

What now?

Try more useful targets with OpenEmbedded. If you like to build an installable cross toolchain matching your filesystem you could build the meta-toolchain-gpe target for example.

Enjoy!

1 0

Sim.One (OpenEmbedded booth at LinuxTag)

OE has support for the Sim.One already and I just added the parameters to build jffs2 filesystems for the internal NOR flash. In order to build jffs2 images for the Sim.One use the current org.openembedded.dev branch.

OpenEmbedded Setup
I just want to introduce the basic ideas and useful settings for these images. More generic information about how to get started with OE can be found here. For my tests I used the minimal distribution definintion in OE and built a very small image. The relevant settings for your build configuration (local.conf) are as follows:

MACHINE = "simone"
DISTRO = "minimal"
LIBC = "eglibc"
IMAGE_FSTYPES = "tar.gz jffs2"

The minimal-image is a good starting point for the internal flash. The image does not include much of functionality but leaves some free space for additional software. OE does not build the filesystem only, it builds the kernel for us as well so that we can start with a consistent set of files. Let’s give it a try and install the built results – I assume you have a U-Boot shell and network+tftp server configured already.

Install Kernel

erase 0x60080000 0x6027ffff
tftp  0x60080000 uImage-simone.bin

Install Filesystem

erase 0x602c0000 0x60800000
tftp 0x602c0000 simone.jffs2

We need to tell the kernel where to find the patitions. The actual layout we are going to use is as follows:

Device    size        name
mtd0:     000c0000 "Firmware"
mtd1: 00200000     "Kernel"
mtd2: 00540000    "Root-FS"

I have set up the configuration of U-Boot in order to minimize te effort booting from some other medium.
setenv bootargs console=ttyAM0 root=/dev/mtdblock2 rootfstype=jffs2 video=ep93xxfb
setenv bootcmd_nor 'setenv bootargs ${bootargs} ${mtdparts} ; bootm 60080000'
setenv bootcmd run bootcmd_nor
setenv mtdparts mtdparts=physmap-flash.0:768k@0(Firmware),
2048k@0xc0000(Kernel),-@0x2c0000(Root-FS)

It works… what can I do now?
Make the filesystem functional: Add useful things to the filesystem – a good candidate might be busybox httpd. Another useful target in OE is meta-toolchain which creates a cross compilation SDK for your device.

Now that you have read the whole text: If you do not want to build yourself you can take a look at my build results.

Enjoy!

0 0

Way more interesting than technical details is to look at the landscape of mobile device software stacks and to place MeeGo in it. So how does this landscape look like now?

• There is Apple with the iPhone – pretty much closed but many developers and sexy hardware but quite limited amount of devices and only one manufacturer.
• Symbian – well established with a large community but it feels like it hits its limits with modern smartphones.
• Samsung just launched Bada which looks quite interesting but does not yet seem to have a large community of developers and users.
• Microsoft Windows Mobile is available for many years now but seems to have lost attraction over the years.
• Palm WebOS is interesting from both developer and user point of view but I think it will be hard for it to compete with all the major players in this area.
• Google developed Android which enjoys a fast growing user- and developer base. It’s easy to get started with Android and there is a wide range of interesting devices available already. It is quite portable since most of the lowlevel components are open source.

Among these the most likely candidate to play the dominating role in the mobile handset market might be Android. At least this is how things look like right now… we all know this market changes pretty fast and you never know what happens next. I think Nils asked the question quite a few of us asked themselves: Will MeeGo become a kind of “Android killer”?

No way I will comment on this but in order to become a more generic platform MeeGo needs to focus on different things Maemo did so far. So far Maemo was focused on supporting a very few devices and contained quite some specialized bits that only worked for the Maemo specific devices and its distribution. I still remember that getting basic support for building the Maemo software stack with OpenEmbedded caused some headaches and sleepless nights. (I was mentor of a GSoC project working on this – just take a look at Kirtika’s blog to find out some details.)  It is good to see that it is quite obvious that MeeGo folks understand that these things will have to change. A good example is the process how to get some hardware supported. For someone like me supporting various device makers the really interesting part will follow: How will the device makers adopt MeeGo and how many of them will ‘jump onto the MeeGo boat’? Having more hardware vendors supporting MeeGo means more users and meant to make the platform more interesting for developers. And gaining interest from developers and users is absolutely vital for any software platform that is going to play a major role in future.

In my opinion there is a lot of potential in MeeGo – the most important one is the fact that the key components are going to be open and portable. The project joins two (comparably small) developer and user communities and combines this new community with the support by two very successful companies. I can imagine that this base is able to attract quite some more valuable contributors like smaller device makers, software companies and open source projects.

I’m pretty sure that ‘The Big Merge’ is going to cause quite some movement in the mobile device landscape…

10 1

So what does this mean for developers and device manufacturers? One thing is for sure: The new platform will become the “grown up” version of Maemo and Moblin. Especially for the Maemo part this means that the focus will change from targeting a very few devices and a quite well-defined software stack to a more generic way to support multiple hard- and software environments. And this is good – only a portable and easy to support platform is attractive for the device makers while the availability of multiple devices is important for its attractively among software developers.

It looks like we have interesting times ahead…

13 2

Visitors at the OE booth

Some things I noticed during my time at the booth is that we have to improve the presentation of the project a little bit. For many visitors even on a developer event like FOSDEM OpenEmbedded is a quite uncommon project and hard to present. We showed a set of different devices at FOSDEM but we always need to explain that these devices are just samples for possible OE target devices. It’s not really obvious how to communicate this… One improvement could be to add sheets with OE information to the devices we show. We should list things like this:

• Name
• CPU Architecture
• Useful OE targets

Another thing I miss is a kind of poster or info sheet that summarizes OE achievements in some lists and numbers. But anyway I think we are getting better and become more and more popular.

Device collection

We have to thank all the project members who helped with our booth – most notably Alessandro, Robert, Marcin and Henning for spending a lot of time at the booth. Special thanks should go to Ulf (from Atmel) and Vladimir (from Archos) who made it possible to have some more interesting devices to show. I think this is the first time we didn’t have a single Zaurus at the booth… :-)

One more project / booth I think is worth to mention is Rep Rap / Makerbot. The bots for turning 3D models into real things you can touch and use gained quite some attraction.

Bots at the booth

Bot detail

Did you notice? You can even use these bots make parts for another one… I think it is worth following these projects. They might become quite important to us in near future.

A working Makerbot - just finished a job

I would have some more things to write about – there were a lot of interesting things going on at FOSDEM but like always time is lacking. More as soon as I manage to write some more lines…

0 0

One project is the Linux port to the Höft & Wessel skeye.pos mobile – I really like the press release because it mentions the fact the supplied devices are running Linux and what the devices are used for. The filesystem on these devices is built with OpenEmbedded and is based on an older Angström release.

The other big project is closely related to both my job for kernel concepts and OpenEmbedded which is one of my favourite open source projects. The µCross distribution will support chip- and device vendors who are going to ship Linux-based solutions. The main idea is to combine the power OpenEmbedded and its large community with a good portion simplicity and a few additions. I do not want to mention too many boring details here so I will just introduce the basic concept: The idea is to offer customers binary packages matching their target architecture, matching toolchains and tools for assembling and configuring filesystem images for their devices.

There is not really an offical announcement yet but one of our business partners just announced a nice SBC module which will come with a µCross-based SDK. The TK71 is a QSeven format module powered by a Marvell 88F6281 SoC (Sheeva core based).

A third project that gained some love is the updated Linux port to the Toshiba Topas910 and TopasA900 boards. I am trying to maintain an upstream compatible and up to date Linux port to these devices here – for the people who do not want to use several year old kernels or this strange Aura stuff.  The latest achievement is that I got some patches to make NAND flash work which is vital for the TopasA900 because its small NOR flash can’t keep a decent filesystem image with GUI.

Ok now I’m done with showing off and I should return to do something useful… such as writing a short report about FOSDEM!

0 0

I spent most of the time at the OpenEmbedded stand and even with enough OpenEmbedded people at LinuxTag I didn’t manage to attend a single talk. But the OE presentation was much better prepared compared to last year: We had a nice A0-sized poster with the new logo, Marcin brought 2500 printed flyers and we had adhesive tape. (Adhesive tape is useful because people in the neighbourhood of your booth are going to like you :-) Of course we had interesting devices to show: I collected some decices at home and at the office with the focus on useful devices to get started with embedded Linux (such as the BeagleBoard and a Micro2440).

I built a kind of demo stand for the BeagleBoard and the PICO projector to reduce the cable and device chaos a little bit. It is made from an A5 advertisement sheet holder and a cellphone tripod. The photo shows the idea but most of the necessary cables are missing.

BeagelBoard Demo Stand

We experienced some trouble with my old B4 BeagleBoard and latest filesystem images but the nice guys from the BeagleBoard/TI booth helped us out with a shiny new one – many thanks!

While we are on it… some more people deserve thanks: Marcin for flyers and his presence at the booth, Philip Balister who spent a lot of time at the booth too as well as pHilipp Zabel, Henning Heinold and Robert Schuster. Then there is Tarent who sponsored and organized the Embedded Area and managed to bring a pretty good supply for coffee :-)

The next important event for OE will be the upcoming OEDEM (the OE Developer Meeting). Please take part in the poll for the date when it should take place. We are still searching for a good location – in central Europe preferrably… suggestions are very welcome.

Have a good time…

PS: If someone has a good picture of the OE booth… I’d like to attach one here to this blog.

Update: Marcin has a photo he took at the OE stand:

Another photo - by Petra Kirchner

0 0

Some time ago OpenedHand published an Anjuta plugin for Poky that almost fits these needs – apart from minor lacks and the fact that you can’t use it with an OpenEmbedded build tree because it relies on the Poky directory layout. It didn’t take me long to modify the Poky plugin to fit the needs for OpenEmbedded: I have added automatic detection of the toolchain host prefix and some functionality to deal with the (not 100% fixed) directory layout of OpenEmbedded. So what does it do?

• Select a toolchain or OpenEmbedded build directory to use
• Configure and build a project
• Deploying of binaries to a target device using rsync and ssh
• Some debug and remote device features from the original plugin I didn’t test so far

Anjuta OpenEmbedded SDK Plugin

It is easy to install (and build if necessary). I have created an initial website for it at KC Labs. You can find both source archive and binary packages for Ubuntu (9.04) and Debian Lenny. Once you have it installed it you should be able to design your GUI, fill it with functionality and deploy the application to a target device withouth leaving Anjuta.

Feedback is very welcome – if you have ideas about new features or what you would like to see for cross development please let me know!

Have a nice time…

PS: LinuxTag is approaching – visit the Embeded Area with projects like OpenEmbedded and Coreboot!

0 0

First is about OpenEmbedded: We will be present at LinuxTag from 24th to 27th of June in Berlin/Germany. I just hope they have a little bit more space for us at the Embedded Area compared to last year. We usually have a lot of interesting devices running OE built Linux we can show. I’m really looking forward to LinuxTag – I haven’t missed one for many years and its always a nice event with a good mixture of community members, business people and users.

LinuxTag

Google Summer of Code is in progress for some weeks now and I’m in the great position to mentor a very interesting Maemo project… something I always wanted to see but noone found time to do it properly so far: Integrate the Maemo software framework into OpenEmbedded. The benefits are quite obvious – Maemo software will gain compatibility and quality by running on (and if necessary adapting to) various devices. Apart from the fact that Maemo is a pretty good open source framework attracting quite a lot of developers. This is something other devices can and should gain advantage from. Well rkirti made a pretty good description of the project which can be found here.

It would be pretty cool to see Maemo running on this nice device I received a few days ago…

Micro2440 running gpe-mini-browser2

Its a FriendlyARM Micro2440 from Watterott Electronic – this one is equipped with the 7 inch display which gives some more “freedom” to the applications :-) Apart from this the hardware is the same I described in my previous post.

The screen geometry would match the one used by all Maemo devices so far, so it would not mess up all the graphical user interfaces. But there is still some work to do till the boards become a really good development platform. We can build useful filesystem images for them but the installation is still split up into too many steps and the up to date kernels still lack proper support for the camera and the wifi module.

I have made a toolchain to build software for both these devices and the Topas910. Together with an updated install instruction it can be found here at labs.kernelconcepts.de.  Now I’m investigating ways to integrate the toolchains with IDEs in order to simplify application development for mobile and embedded devices.

Micro2440 with Ultimate++ demo application

Here the device runs one of the Ultimate++ demo applications built with its IDE and the GPE-flavour cross toolchain built with OpenEmbedded. A friendly colleague found out what needs to be done to use it for ARM targets… it still needs a little help since Ultimate++ doesn’t seem to have an idea about pkgconfig and I’m not really happy with the size of the resulting binaries. But more about IDEs later…

Have a good time… and see you in Berlin!

7 0

If you want to get started with embedded Linux the board might be exactly what you want: A 400MHz ARM9 based Samsung S3C2440A CPU which is pretty well supported by Linux. 64MB od RAM and the same amount of NAND flash and 2MB of NOR flash for a backup bootloader. The baseboard has the connectors for the serial ports, USB host and client, display, expansion and SD and adds an audio codec and an Ethernet chip. There are two variants available: One with a 3.5″ QVGA TFT (pictured) and one with a 7″ 800×480 TFT.  Both displays come with a touchscreen and in addition to this the board has a few buttons that can be used for a human interface. The whole SDK kit including Micro2440, SDK board, 3.5″ display cables and JTAG doesn’t cost more than 125 EUR incl. VAT which makes it even more appealing.

The ‘softer’ part of the SDK quite appealing too: The hardware is pretty well documented, even the schematics are available to the public. FriendlyARM released some demo images and Linux sources that are useful (but not perfect). The ‘Vivi’ bootloader used by the boards can be replaced with u-boot easily so that you get a 100% Open Source embedded development environment.

Thanks to the OpenMoko community the S3C is pretty well supported in Linux and u-boot. There is a public project providing up to date Linux, u-boot and QEmu supoort for these boards that can be found here. Like I usually do for a new piece of embedded or mobile hardware I used OpenEmbedded to built a GPE based filesystem image for it. Like you can see in the picture it works pretty well. For people interested in this I put together some notes I took and the binary images at KC Labs. Feel free to contact me about this… I plan to extend support for it a little bit and provide a toolchain and additional information.

Have a nice time!

PS: Sorry for the bad image this time, I had to use the webcam to capture it.

0 0

While the ongoing financial and ecomomic crisis seems to be the most popular topic for months now I try to make this blog a little more positive – some pice of contrast.

I has been a little bit quiet around LinuxToGo for quite a while. We didn’t manage to do more than the absolutely vital administrative tasks and the machine suffered badly from the high load. But there are some lights on the horizon: First I seem to have a little bit of time to work on it again – I managed to sort out the worst I/O bottleneck caused by having all I/O load on a single disk. Thanks to Jay7 for the hints! I wrote a few lines about the server status and some statistics here.

The second is that LinuxToGo has gained new sponsor: Bytemark Hosting sponsors a virtual server for us. Now we finally have the chance to distribute the load among two devices. Many thanks to Nick Thomas (lupine_85) for the idea and approaching us and his boss Matthew Bloch!

There are quite some good news in the Maemo world as well. First is that the Maemo Community Council elections have started – active community members have the chance to elect the council till the end of March 19th. Mer, the community driven distribution project for Nokia Internet Tablets and some more devices seems to evolve more and more – there is a quite interesting article about it at LWN.net.

The new Mameo 5 SDK Alpha release runs on BeagleBoard now too – Juha wrote a blog entry about this in the Maemo DT group blog.

While we are on this topic already… the BeagleBoard has gained an interesting companion: The Leopard expansion board which comes with a camera and ethernet. I do not know much about it yet, but it is based on the TI DaVinci DM355. I’ll try to find out more and update the information here.

The last thing I’d like to mention is a little bit offtopic… I found this interesting proof for engineering beeing a kind of art while repairing the amplifier in my living room:

Creative, isn’t it?

I hope you enjoyed this tiny pile of good news :-)

Have a nice time…

5 0

But let’s stay with the ‘good’ ones: Karo Electronics showed a new low cost DIMM sized embedded module based on a 400MHz ARM9 CPU (The datasheet mentions Freescale, but lacks the name the chip.) A friend bought a similar one (a TX27) which came with full Linux kernel sources.

A real suprise was the booth of EBV: They build and sell their own BeagleBoard called EBVBeagle.

EBVBeagle (image source: EBV)

Its actually a BeagleBoard revision C2 with green PCB boxed with some useful accessories. It comes as a quite complete starter kit with AC adapter, USB to Ethernet adapter, MMC card, USB hub and some cables. The official press release can be found here. They claim (but not gurantee) to be able to deliver within two weeks. Looks like the only drawback is the minimum order value of 250 EUR which is – of course – more than the EBVBeagle kit.

Apropos Beagle Board – Maemo (which runs on the BeagleBoard too) has released some new bits. First  Maemo 5 alpha SDK is ready and released. This is pretty good for people using it on the Beagle Board because only the Maemo 5 SDKs support the OMAP3 SoC. For people who want to learn about Maemo development or development for Limux mobile devices in general there is a new Maemo Tutorial release. The Maemo Tutorial provides quite easy to understand and detailed information about Maemo platform and application development. It gives a lot of useful information about development for other Linux mobile device platforms as well.

Enjoy…

12 0

OE booth with some devices and visitors

But even if we PICO beamer and laser keyboard are not our key competence these were quite well eyecaters: It was very interesting to watch people using the projected keyboard and beamer and find out what they like about it and to get to know for which needs this set of devices does not fit. Combining these into a single case starts to become a very appealing project. I have a (big) case for an initial test already, but making all components fit into it is not that easy – especially if you do not have time and resoures to make a custom board layout for it and you want GSM network connectivity included as well.

Beagleboard and keyboard engine with parts of the case

My Telit GSM modem evaluation kit would have been nice to use but its too big to fit into the case. I have ordered an UMTS modem with USB connector instead.

But back to OE:

I have to thank all the OE developers who helped to man the booth – most important Phillip (Crofton), Mans (mru) and Graeme (XorA) who where at the booth almost the whole time. And of course there is Atmel – they sponsored some NGW100 evaluation boards for interested OE developers and one for a raffle among our visitors.

Have a good time…

8 0

I read a few lines about odeviced… anyone else who thinks that using something like this for Maemo might be a goo idea?

I do not have much time left for blogging and coding currently – family and work keep me busy these times. But a few good things are in prgress – OpenSync’s roadmap indicates that they are close to a new release. This will be a much better base for MaemoSync than current SVN trunk. Even GPE makes a little bit of progress. Graham continues fixing various PIM bugs and gpe-memo is close to become ready for its first release.

Have a nice time…

5 0

LinuxTag always gives a lot of inspiration for new things to do and projects to check out. I know about some interesting software we need in OE soon – things like the Sugar framework for the OLPC and x2go. Other important tasks are to publish a list of evices that are defined in OE metadata and pushing the mobile-linux project forward.

In the Maemo track I had a short talk about GPE applications for Maemo – the slides of my talk can be found here. Unluckily I was not able to attend more of the interesting talks in this track. But I found out that the Mamona people seem to like OpenEmbedded at least :-)

The Tarent and Mobile booth right after opening in the morning… it was way more crowded a short time later.

Many thanks to all the people organizing LinuxTag and Tarent for booth and the big red sofa for sitting down to write my blog.

5 1

I have never worked with CMake before, but OpenSync had some quite good examples how to check and support additional libraries. So I hacked cmake support for some basic Maemo components (libhildon, libosso) and Maemo-like Debian packages.

My cmake files can be found here:

http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/maemo/

CMake itself is in the official extras-devel repository at maemo.org. Just add this line to your sources.list:

deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel chinook free


The package is available for all other SDKs from the same location.

The DpkgDeb.cmake file is based on the updated DpkgDeb.cmake by Mehdi Rabah. The other ones are based on random files found in OpenSync SVN.

1 3

I have made an installable package for Maemo Sync, but do not expect too much. Its a basic port of the current Multisync-gui to Maemo. It is only tested to so far that the GUI starts up and registeres correctly. The fact that I had to use cmake for building Maemo software caused some headaches here… the quality of the source distribution package is still quite bad.

I also did not decide if I want it to become a project forked from Multisync-gui or to maintained with Multisync-gui adding optional support for Maemo environment. The always changing OpenSync API would be a reason to stay with Multisync-gui, but the fact that I have different opinions about UI design, Glade is involved and cmake are reasons for making it a separate project.

Binary package and sources are located here. You also need the OpenSync packages from Graham’s daily repository.

Another minor improvement of the GPE application packages in this repository is that latest Starling supports OGG playback. You only need to have an OGG plugin for GStreamer installed. The mogg package provides this for example.

Any feedback is welcome – if you manage to sync data with either the command line tool msynctool or using Maemo Sync please drop me a line. I would like to collect information which sync peers work with latest OpenSync and how to set up these.

Enjoy!

6 0