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Poulsbo GMA500 driver is going mainline kernel
Some days ago, I was brave to do a "do-release-upgrade" call on my fit-pc2. Before it was 11.04 and now I am running Ubuntu 11.10.
But of course this only works with my own linux kernel. I had som 3.2.0-rc2 running from november. This kernel won't be replaced by Ubuntu. That's of course, what I wanted.
My first problem after upgrade was the music playback. It run too fast (!) and alsa threw error messages about buffer underrun.
So, I assumed some problems with my "old" kernel and the updated alsa userland libs/tools. And decided to upgrade the kernel by a fresh "git pull".
After this, the music is working again - but where is my gma500 driver gone? It moved from staging to mainline drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/ !
Alan Cox started last november the move. And now it will be finished with coming kernel release 3.3. The driver is called gma500_gfx now.
I'm really happy about this!
The only thing I had to change, is my kernel config.
There is still one issue open: On bootup, the X-server output is only shown in the top half of the monitor.
I found a simple workaround. I just stop and start the lightdm. This "fixes" the issue for me now. I hope this will be fixed in coming versions of the driver.
I place my fix in /etc/rc.local:
stop lightdm
start lightdm
Trim-Slice Arrived - First Steps
- Trim-Slice in UPS Package
- Trim-Slice unpacked
- Trim-Slice First Boot into Ubuntu 11.04
Last week, I read again some forum posts about the Compulab Trim-Slice and.... Yes, I ordered one Trim-Slice Pro directly from Compulab in Israel! It costs $370 including shipping to Germany.
It was quite fast with UPS Saver in Dresden. Compulab shipped it on Sunday, 31th July and it arrived today on Tuesday, 2th August. Yesterday, UPS from Cologne called me to get my customs-tariff-number. I have never heard about this but I applied for one and this was enough for UPS and the customs. I only had to pay the import VAT (19%) but this will be refunded later.
Puh, it was quite easy to start the Trim-Slice. I just connected my monitor with an DVI-HDMI-cable, plugged the power and after approximately 2 minutes the Ubuntu desktop was seen. There is no boot-logo, splash-screen or text console to follow. I don't know yet, howto edit e.g. the u-boot parameters. I will see later.
The system works, even wireless seemed to work at the first glance. But later I noticed that it is quite unstable with my WPA2 protected network. I'm not sure why, but I started to compile the trimslice-kernel and to replace the included rt2800usb driver with the rt2870sta from RaLink. With no success until now :-(
At the moment, the Trim-Slice seems to be slower than my Fit-PC2 and it's getting hot because the power management is not working yet. Unfortunately, I cannot measure the power consumption at the moment. This and many other details will follow in this blog.
So stay tuned!
Update:
Accessing the u-boot is so easy. That's why the Trim-Slice has an ordinary serial port! Connected with a null-modem-cable and an USB-serial-converter, you can access the console with minicom. There you follow the boot process and you login automatically as root user. Great! My own, native compiled kernel is working now.
Kernel 3.0.0 out and running on fit-pc2
- fit-pc2 running with LXDE and kernel 3.0.0
I just realized that kernel 3.0.0 is available since friday. So I just compiled it with my config from 2.6.39 and... trara: it's working! Here you can find my new config-3.0.0 for the fit-pc2.
Compared to the last kernel upgrade, this one was quite easy. The psb_gfx driver comes still from the psb-dkms package.
What's new in kernel 3.0.0? First: the version numbering. After 2.6.39 follows now 3.0.0. Ok, if Linus like so, why not. We are working to long with 2.6. But I hope, the linux kernel is not following now the version numbering inflation like chrome and firefox...
There is a quite good site where the changes are explaned: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges
fit-pc2 Running With Kernel 2.6.39.2 and Ubuntu 11.04
Kernel 2.6.39.2 with gma500 driver from staging tree
Recently, I spent a couple of hours to update and upgrade my fit-pc2.
I started with the kernel which was running 2.6.37.1 with the psb driver for the Intel GMA500 (Poulsbo) graphics engine. Unfortunately this driver isn't maintained anymore and does not compile with 2.6.38 or even 2.6.39 kernels.
But in the meantime, a new driver entered the staging tree of the kernel and is already part of 2.6.39. This driver-directory is called gma500 but the module is named psb_gfx and the driver is named psbfb. This driver supports Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) and uses the fbdev driver from xorg.
It took me some hours to get this running. Of course because I even compile the kernel on the fit-pc2 which is not that fast. But the biggest problem was to find a working kernel config and the setting for the right display resolution. In my case the monitor is connected to DVI (on the HDMI plug) and has a native resolution of 1440x900.
Here is my kernel config for 2.6.39.2 and I had to change the grub default settings in /etc/default/grub for my monitor:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_skip_timer \
nomodeset video=DVI-D-1:1440x900 pci=nocrs mem=896mb"
Please note: the current driver doesn't support reading your monitor EDID data by itsself. It will start with 1024x768 by default. To get information about the connector (in my case DVI-D-1), I added the parameter "drm.debug=7" to the kernel command line.
I don't know why, but I still need a xorg.conf file. Without it, the USB keyboard and mouse won't work.
After the kernel, I upgraded Ubuntu from 10.10 to 11.04 without any problems.
Sound with Intel HDA
With the new kernel, it was'n possible to use the sound as normal user. So I was checking the drivers and the permissions. After killing pulseaudio, it was possible for the root user to playback sound.
When reloading the alsa drivers there was always a strange warning I've never seen:
sudo alsa force-reload
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/ab/.gvfs
This was the solution: there were some permission issues for this userfilesystem. My solution was the following in the /home/ab/ directory:
sudo umount .gvfs
chmod 755 .gvfs
sudo /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-fuse-daemon .gvfs
Scanimage with Canon LiDE 20
I have a simple flatbed scanner connected via USB and this scanner didn't work with the new 2.6.39 kernel anymore. But why?
This was another permission issue because root was able to scan. In my kernel config I disabled CONFIG_USB_DEVICE_CLASS because it is marked as DEPRECATED. The current Ubuntu udev rules seems to prefer the old fashioned way. I had to change the permissions for the new style in /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules:
# libusb device nodes
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0666"
This is of course a dirty workaround and no solution. But anyway. Let's wait for Ubuntu 11.10!
The scanner is found now and working as usual:
ab@ab-fit:~$ scanimage -L
device `plustek:libusb:004:009' is a Canon CanoScan N670U/N676U/LiDE20 flatbed scanner
xxsvideo is still alive!
- xxsvideo on Sourceforge.net
Long time ago, in 2007, I created at mycable the xxsvideo Sourceforge project. This is a simple buildsystem for the xxsvideo embedded board from mycable and Fujitsu.
These days, I updated some scripts to support current Ubuntu releases. The old scripts did only work up to Ubuntu 8.04. Not it should work with Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10.
The updated scripts are comitted to the Sourceforge SVN on the project site.
Please have a try and send me patches and/or bugreports if you find something not working as expected. Later on, we could do a new maintenance release out of this.
To check it out just use the following command on your console:
svn co https://xxsvideo.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xxsvideo xxsvideo