1. My UK trip — London

    I was few times in London but always on business without time for sightseeing so decided to change it.

    Day one

    After few hours trip landed at London Gatwick airport. Some say that’s worst one of five but was not so bad. Why there? Because I could and I was on Stansted, Luton and Heathrow already (plan to use City one next time). Short trip to the city and hello Victoria station — long time no see

    Bought Oyster card to use public transport in easiest way and took a metro train to hotel. Nothing fancy — just cheap (65£ per night) hotel without any extras (but with working free WiFi).

    Unpacked only needed things and went to city centre. Victoria monument, Buckingham Palace, the Mall etc. More or less followed the most popular trip from the “Trip Advisor” application.

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    Went to Thames, crossed with one bridge, looked at London Eye (and decided to skip it) and then Big Ben and Westminster Abbey were next. I considered returning to the Abbey next day but later decided against it.

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    Grabbed some food and went to sleep early as it was 3rd day when I woke up around 5:00.

    Day two

    Thursday… Skipped Westminster Abbey and went by foot to the British Museum. Met Mark Brown on a way and we had good time looking at all those things which British Empire had stolen from all around the world. We didn’t managed to find Britain sections.

    After lunch I went to the Forbidden Planet store. And sunk there for quite long time. Then got back to buy two more books. This place was amazing…

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    They had stuff related to movies, games, tv series - figurines, key chains, t-shirts, toys, rings/jewellery, helmets, weapons and other… Some from limited editions. But when I wondered “is that’s all?” I went to the basement. And sank.

    Comics, books, movies, tv series, manga, anime, photo albums and more. Books about movies, books which movies were based on (and vice versa). “Darth Vader’s princess” and “Darth Vader and his son” were there (9£ each), “Simon’s cat” books which my daughter would love (so I bought one), lot of SF and fantasy books in nice editions (Asimov for example).

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    Big book of butts” looked funny. Next one was “Big book of legs” next to “pin-up girls” and other photo/erotic ones.

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    Nice place to go to but I warn you - you can leave a lot of cash there and have problem packing…

    Lack of Britain sections in museum made me go to their website to check floor plan. And back to the building to see few more exhibitions. When I finally found what was searching for they told us to leave :-(

    But no need to be sad I thought cause I was going to meet long time no see friends at a pub not so far away. Went there, ordered some “organic lager” and sat down to wait for them. Few minutes later I had a chat with some guys around 60 years old about some random stuff. Good part were their recommendations which beer to try next. As you probably guess it was not lager but rather ale or something more English.

    YaaL and Pornel arrived and we had nice chat about life, work etc. Time passed too fast :-( But it was good to meet after so many years.

    Day three

    This had to be no museums day. First I went to visit Canonical’s office as I have never been there…

    Finding building was quite easy, then discussion with security took a bit more before they finally realised that I am on a visitors list already. Got tour of the office, looked at wall full of Ubuntu Touch interface mockups, discussed few of them with someone, made some coffee and left the building.

    Next step was Tete Modern Art gallery. I spent few hours there watching all those sculptures, paintings and installations which were counted as art in previous century. Did not even tried to understand those…

    Due to cold I got during previous days I went back to the hotel. But why stay there when there are so many places to visit and so little time?

    So I decided to make use of longer opening hours at the British Museum and went there. This time managed to see Britain sections and European Medieval times ones. It was good evening.

    Day four

    As this was my last day in London I decided to not go far from the hotel. Checked out, left luggage and went on foot to the Science Museum.

    Lovely place. Went quickly though Space exhibition (cause most of it I saw at Cape Canaveral already) but other ones were worth seeing. Age of Steam with all those engines and descriptions, vehicles like bikes (starting with “safety bicycle” by Rover), motorcycles, cars (including JET 1 powered by gas turbine) but also planes (with replica of Wright brothers one) and helicopters.

    There was also special exhibition about Alan Turing and his work.

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    I enjoyed the “Materials” exhibition — especially body model with some artificial addons and long list next to it informing which materials can be used for which implants and other inserted parts.

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    After visit I went for food, took luggage from hotel and then the Underground to King’s Cross train station and went to Cambridge. But this will be next post.

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  2. Call for ALSA UCM profiles

    When I bought Samsung ARM Chromebook few months ago I had no idea about UCM profiles and burnt speakers (left is dead, right is resting)…

    This was good lesson. I learnt more about how UseCase Manager works, took profiles from ChromeOS and added them into Ubuntu so other users will be a bit more safe (due to lack of testers it took months to merge it into “precise” and “quantal” releases).

    During last months I had discussions with some Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora developers about how to solve such problems and how to keep UCM profiles shared between distributions.

    In meantime Liam Girdwood pointed me to (not used) UCM git tree at ALSA Project server. So finally I spent some time and sent Ubuntu ones for merging.

    I also got newer profiles for OMAP4 devices and some updates for Chromebook ones.

    The idea is to collect UCM profiles, keep them in one place and share in each distribution packages. So if your hardware has profiles created then join us to make users life easier.

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  3. State of Linaro layers for OpenEmbedded

    As I will leave Linaro at the end of May I would like to write a summary of current state of Linaro layers for OpenEmbedded.

    At Linaro we have 3 layers:

    1. meta-aarch64
    2. meta-linaro
    3. meta-linaro-toolchain

    First one is BSP kind. I know that it had some issues which affected each build which had it in BBLAYERS but I fixed those issues. I would like to thank Khem Raj for pointing me at those.

    We have git version of binutils there due to some changes which were not present in 2.23 line. But use of this version is not required as builds are fine with OE Core one.

    We have “tune-armv8.inc” in this layer as well. There was attempt to merge that into OE Core but “/lib or /lib64” discussion started and at that time I decided to skip it. There are similar discussions at GCC and Glibc mailing lists. Once they sort that out OE tune file will be adapted by someone (I hope).

    Rest of recipes can be split into 2-3 types. Few (like sysprof, emacs) just disable recipes for AArch64. Other have extra patches to add missing functionality or defines. And we have Linaro kernel for AArch64 there.

    Second layer has ARMv7a(b) machine definitions used for our machine independent builds and some recipes.

    There are no patches for OE recipes here. The only exception is busybox where we enable “dpkg(-deb)” command which we need for our tools used to merge rootfs with hardware support.

    We have “recipes-extra” where we keep new recipes which may not be in a nicest state so are not yet merged into OpenEmbedded (or have no use there like “meta-toolchain-hhvm” one).

    recipes-linaro” is for our stuff. Images, automatic root shell on serial port etc.

    And finally is toolchain layer. Everything here is related to gcc-linaro and Linaro binary cross toolchains (armv7a and aarch64 ones). GCC 4.6 and 4.7 is there but 4.6 one will be removed when 4.8 will be added into OE Core.

    Who will maintain those layers after my leave? This was not decided yet. There are few guys at Linaro who know how to use OpenEmbedded but I think that most of them is outside of Builds and Baselines team.

    If you have any questions then better ask now.

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  4. Looks like it is time for me to say good bye again

    Good things have one ugly part in common — they have to end one day… For me that day will be 31st May 2013 when contract between Canonical and Linaro will end.

    Those 3 years were great. I wrote a lot about it half year ago so those of you who are new - go to my previous “good bye Linaro” post before reading rest of this post.

    Half year ago I was going to Canonical but got hold at Linaro for longer. Then I made a mistake by agreeing to postpone my move to Linaro instead of joining as soon as possible — my fault…

    Last 6 months were full of interesting things. We went from just bootstrapped AArch64 port to fully working LAMP and SDK images built with OpenEmbedded. I integrated all Linaro layers into one repository and reorganized in a way that those who want only our toolchains can have them without using any of our changes. This move was greeted by lot of maintainers and users from OpenEmbedded community. Wherever new toolchain components were provided for tests I had them checked on first day to see how AArch64 situation got improved and provided fixes when they were needed.

    Recent release of Yocto Project has several changes done by me and Riku Voipio integrated. OpenEmbedded project also made release and has even more our changes in it. Most of those were AArch64 related, some were software updates or fixes to low level stuff.

    Linaro Enterprise Group has Owen Yamauchi from Facebook working on porting HipHopVM. He is using SDK created by OpenEmbedded to not worry about any build dependencies or missing libraries. With my work (and work from porters like Riku Voipio, Steve McIntyre, Yvan Roux and others) he got not only libraries but also tools he needed for his job.

    Andy Johnson started OpenJDK porting — also with OpenEmbedded. Riku provided instructions which I merged into our ‘jenkins-setup’ scripts to make live easier for Andy.

    Due to all that work I am often contacted by random people (not only from Linaro) wherever they have some AArch64 related questions. Sometimes even with ARMv4/EABI related like post from Nicolas Pitre a day after RMK wrote that FPU emulator has to be removed from the Linux kernel. I provided him instructions how to make such build and just to be sure that I did not made any mistakes I tried one on my machine. IIRC none of main distributions support EABI for ARMv4 (no thumb) processors.

    But looks like all that has to end. Unless someone from Linaro member companies (or who knows, maybe even Linaro itself) wants to hire me. I am open for offers.

    If I go outside of @linaro.org then I would like to stay around and check how things go — probably as ‘community member’ or how it is called.

    And one more thing at the end. As usual when I end my work at one place I gather recommendations on LinkedIn. If you have few spare minutes and want to write something then it will be appreciated.

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  5. Linux 3.9 and Chromebook support

    Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.9 and many websites published summaries what’s new in it. One of common entries is support for ChromeOS laptops. But what that means for Samsung ARM Chromebook users?

    Let’s start with Kernel Newbies summary which lists 5 commits:

    None of them are for ARM Chromebook. But that does not mean that nothing was done for it. Touchpad driver was merged, many Exynos platform changes were made but yeah — still lot to do.

    But that’s a curse of ARM platforms…

    UPDATE: Arnd Bermann wrote a comment on my Google+ post that Olof Johansson has “linux-next” bootable on ARM Chromebook. YAY!

    UPDATE: I got ChromeOS 3.8 kernel running on my Chromebook. Needs some testing and then will land in “saucy” as default one probably.

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  6. 3 years at Canonical

    Today I can celebrate 3 years of working for Canonical.

    First days

    I was supposed to start from 1st May but as I had vacations already planned for that week (in Poland 1st and 3rd May are national holidays) they asked me to start work one week earlier — on 26th April 2010.

    First week was usual learning about company rules, structure, reading wiki etc. Then I went for vacations and right after I was going for UDS-M (somewhere around Brussels, Belgium) where I met a team of people of unnamed project. Some days after event that team got a name: Linaro.

    Linaro Developer Platform

    I am a member of Developer Platform from beginning. Our team was changing, we got more people than we lost some as they moved to newly created teams and we had few renames. First it was Foundations (like Ubuntu Foundations at Canonical), then Developer Platform, then just Platform. Now we are Bold & BeautifulBuilds and Baselines.

    We work on delivering components done by other teams (like ARM and AArch64 cross toolchains, Linux kernel), provide test images created from Ubuntu packages or built with OpenEmbedded (soon also Fedora).

    Since September 2012 I am working on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) bring-up with use of OpenEmbedded (as at that time none of distributions had anything working to base on). Updated toolchain, fixed many issues with different software packages, patched some applications/libraries. Cooperated with few teams at Linaro and with several upstream projects.

    Canonical or Linaro?

    As some people remember there was a moment last year when I was supposed to leave Linaro and go to Canonical. But someone decided to keep me for longer

    But such things does not last forever. At the end of May I will probably end my journey at Linaro cause contract for Canonical’s engineers will end. Unless someone wants to keep me for longer…

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  7. Time to visit UK again?

    I plan to visit London and Cambridge on 16-22 May. Just for sight-seeing and meeting friends — no business this time.

    Plan is to meet old OpenedHand fellows, some old friends from Poland, maybe visit Canonical office just to see it (as I work for them for nearly 3 years). And of course see something cause I was few times in London but managed to see only train/metro stations and nearly nothing more.

    Then Cambridge for 40th Cambridge Beer Festival. There are friends to meet as well and maybe see something as well (but here I saw far more things than in London).

    As usual flights from/to Berlin to one of London airports (plan to return from Stansted as it is the easiest to get there from Cambridge). Need to sort out some places to stay.

    Also have to check which UK prepaid is useful today. I need few gigabytes over HSPA — previously Giffgaff was fine for it for just 10 GBP but they have changed rules. Tethering required due to tablet and Chromebook (which I plan to get repaired or replaced).

    Any suggestions for 3G or place to stay?

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
  8. Death to Raspberry/Pi — Beaglebone Black is on a market

    As guys from/around Texas Instruments promised there is new Beaglebone Black on a market. Faster, cheaper, with video output and other extras. For me it looks like Raspberry/Pi killer done right.

    What is on board?

    There is a lot of goods:

    • 1GHz TI AM355x cpu with ARM Cortex-A8 core supporting ARMv7-a instruction set
    • PowerVR GPU with OpenGL ES support (closed source driver)
    • HDMI output (with audio)
    • 512MB ram
    • 2GB eMMC
    • 92 expansion pins
    • USB Host
    • USB device
    • Ethernet
    • microSD slot
    • user controlled LEDs
    • serial port header

    And it still supports (most of) expansion boards from the original Beaglebone which can add extra functionality so possibilities are uncountable. All that for only 45$.

    But why it is better?

    1. ARMv7-a cpu core. It means that you can run any Linux distribution on it. Think Ubuntu/armhf, Debian/armhf, Fedora/armhf. No need to reinvent a wheel (aka armhfv6 done for Raspbian distribution).

    2. No dependencies on closed source components. You can boot board and use it with what ever you want and still have control on all sources used. Sure, there are some binary blobs for OpenGL ES but if you do not need this then you are fine. Try to boot R/Pi without binary blobs…

    3. Texas Instruments level of support. Sure, we heard that they abandoned mobile market but Sitara line of processors is still in development, there are new CPUs and they provide documentation and source code for product. Also amount of work done in mainline kernel is not something to be ignored.

    4. Expansion headers. Compare 26 pins of R/Pi with 92 of Beaglebone… Then add capes to this.

    So which one to choose?

    Beaglebone Black of course ;D

    As people on IRC told there are other cheap devices made in China with faster cpus and more memory. But for me Beaglebone is not ‘yet another ARM computer’ but rather ‘yet another microcontroller on ultra steroids’ and this is where the true power of this board resides.

    Written by Marcin Juszkiewicz on
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