Categories
Computers

Poky in the Android emulator

We (at OpenedHand) have been emulating ARM devices in QEMU for a while using images generated from Poky. I wondered how easy it would be to run a poky image under the Android emulator. Sadly the emulator crashes if touched by dbus and is QVGA whereas Poky’s UI (Sato) is targeted at VGA but it still roughly works. The following images show the standard emulator running a Poky built kernel and root filesystem (all entirely open source):

Categories
Computers Zaurus

Poky 3.0 (Blinky) Released

It gives me great pleasure to announce a new release of Poky, version 3.0 (blinky). There are lots of new features in this although the biggest change is no doubt the introduction of the new look and feel known as Sato along with the new desktop, panel and Pimlico application “Tasks”. A rough summary of the changes is:

  • Sato 0.1 - simple fast GTK+ based PDA/Smartfone fully featured theme and application framework
  • Latest Pimlico packages (Contacts, Dates and the new Tasks)
  • Matchbox Panel-2 and Matchbox Desktop 2
  • Improved customised version of Puzzles
  • bitbake 1.8 series based - faster and more efficient builds than ever before including multi-process build support
  • Latest X.org X11 packages (X11R7.2 based)
  • Package Epoch support
  • Standalone/External/Prebuilt toolchain support
  • Improved QEMU images including distcc support and improved integration
  • Introduction of 'formfactor' - physical hardware abstraction layer
  • GTKTerm replacing rxvt
  • Linux 2.6.21 Kernel
  • GTK Input Method support
  • Latest oprofile including support for oprofileui, a remote control interface for oprofile.
  • Improved/new profiling tools such as exmap and valgrind (qemux86 only)
  • Addition of gdbserver for remote debugging
  • Improved ease of image control/creation/customisation through FEATURES
  • Experimental Nokia N800 and FIC-GTA01 support
  • Experimental bootable x86 cd image support

Here are links to the release and images. See the poky website for more information including screenshots.

Categories
Computers Zaurus

Mystery Segfaults Solved

After much painful debugging, I finally found the cause of the segfaults I was seeing on EABI images, particularly with glibc 2.4/2.5. It turned out to be a cache flushing problem affecting StrongARM, XScale and ARMv6 processors. The bug must have been in the kernel for years and only triggered by the changed usage patterns in glibc 2.4/2.5.

I submitted a patch for the problem which has been accepted into the mainline kernel and will be in 2.6.20.
(http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/patches/viewpatch.php?id=4078/1, http://www.rpsys.net/openzaurus/patches/archive/xscale_cache_workaround-r1.patch). I’d recommend anyone using the affected processors to apply this patch.

Categories
Computers

QEMU ARM Images complete with a toolchain

A while back I mentioned having ARM images working over NFS under the QEMU system emulator. I’m now pleased to report I have a complete toolchain working under the emulator. I’ve made a sample image and support files available so others can experiment with it. For more details see http://www.o-hand.com/~richard/qemu.html

Categories
Computers

OE + QEMU + NFS

I’m pleased to report successful booting of OpenEmbedded/Poky generated ARM images under QEMU with the root filesystem being mounted over NFS.

http://www.rpsys.net/openzaurus/qemu/ has the gory details.

Categories
Computers Zaurus

Oprofile Support for arm complete

My arm backtrace code has been accepted into the kernel so oprofile support for arm is complete!

Categories
Computers Zaurus

w100fb rewrite

The first draft of the w100fb patches have been submitted for review to linux-fbdev-devel

Categories
Computers Zaurus

Corgi Suspend/Resume Fixed

The c7x0 has been getting more and more sensitive to the length of time the suspend/resume button was pressed. I’ve finialy tracked this down to the suspend/resume behaviour of the keyboard driver and fixed it.