Marcin Juszkiewicz

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:

• Platform: x86: Add Chrome OS Laptop driver
• Platform: x86: chromeos_laptop - Add Acer C7 trackpad
• Platform: x86: chromeos_laptop - Add HP Pavilion 14
• Platform: x86: chromeos_laptop - Add Pixel Touchscreen
• Platform: x86: chromeos_laptop - Add Taos tsl2583 device

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.

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…

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?

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.

I am subscribed to many mailing lists. Creating filters for them was usually pain but keeping all in one folder was also not useful. So I decided to make it more automatic.

There are many pages which will tell you how to use maildrop, how nice it is etc. But as I am used to “autofolder” set of procmail rules written by Kamal Mostafa from Canonical I had some requirements already and some ideas how to handle few things in other way.

So what I did? Maybe not so much so far:

• handle @list[sy].DOMAIN servers
• autocreation of folder structure (/ML/{DOMAIN}/{LISTNAME})
• all GitHub projects are handled as folders of github.com

There is a lot of work to do but for now I am happy with what I did.

You can see it in hrw/dotfiles-mailfilter repository on github.

If someone finds it useful then please comment, fork, send merge requests, patches etc.

Around week ago courier brought me Nexus 7 tablet (32GB, wifi only) as kind of upgrade to my Archos G9 80 ‘so called’ Turbo one.

First steps

Charged a bit, booted into Android 4.2 and was greeted by “upgrade to 4.2.2 is possible” soon after wifi connection. But decided to go my way instead ;)

Fetched Clockworkmod touch recovery, CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly image and Google Apps 4.2.2 pack and booted into bootloader. Quick ‘OEM unlock’, flash of new recovery and few minutes later I had CM 10.1 running just like I wanted.

Restored apps from Archos with use of TitaniumBackup and after some configuration I had tablet which responds fast and behaves properly.

Multiuser stuff

As my daughter was main user of Archos I waited for Android 4.2 to get multi user capabilities. Played a bit with them on G9 (with Paranoid Android installation) but 512MB ram and OMAP4430 gave my terrible experience with far too many moments when I wanted to crush tablet into pieces…

So when Mira had come from kindergarten I shown her Nexus 7, made a photo with internal ‘want to be a camera’ thing and gave instructions on how to turn device on and switch to her configuration. She had no problems with understanding it ;)

There are some issues with multiuser stuff. Each user is expected to have Google account, applications are not shared etc. I understand why but in my case it was annoying.

But there is Multi-User App Share app which allows to share applications with different users. So Mira has all her children apps and games available and is not able to spend real money on in-app payments due to lack of Google account (and credit card). I was able to remove them from my configuration as well.

Sharing files is more complicated as so far I did not check is there a shared space for them. So each of us has own music/movies.

Do I miss something?

There are few things which Archos G9 80 has and Nexus does not:

• HDMI output
• microSD slot
• USB Host port

I may miss video output sometimes but had not used it for over half a year now. MicroSD would be nice so I would not have to buy 32GB version. But ~20% of tablet (50$) was sponsored by Tizen ;)

And by USB Host port I mean normal EHCI host port. Not an OTG one present in Nexus 7.

But I do not miss crazy upgrade scheme invented by Archos. Also do not miss I Scream for Sandwitch version of Android they offered. We have XXI century and their upgrade path is from previous millenium.

Complains?

So far I did not find something to complain about. OK, screen could be more square (4:3 Archos, 16:10 Nexus) but it is fine for me. Ask me in few months ;)

I think that most asked question about Chromebook in last months was about hardware acceleration. So let’s write something about it.

OpenGL ES

There is a driver for OpenGL ES for Samsung Exynos5 Dual cpu present in Chromebook. But there are two versions of it: Week35 and Week45. Both require different kernel versions.

Ubuntu 13.04 has 3.4.0-5 kernel package which was built from R23 kernel branch. Week35 OpenGL ES driver works with it and you have to grab it from ChromeOS (but maybe it got updated there already).

I still have to find time and get R25 (or R26 or R27) kernel working so we could upgrade to Week45 driver. This one is available in ChromeOS as well (beta or dev).

Where are my packages?

There were packages which provided OpenGL ES driver binaries (week45). I removed them due to license issues as it looks like Samsung bought Mali T604 license from ARM Ltd. and got it working with Exynos5 Dual. Then they sub licensed it to Google for use with ChromeOS.

So Samsung does not distribute the driver — Google does. And even when they give tarball with files there is no license in it — just standard “Google Terms of Service” note.

No redistribution license == no packages. Sure, someone can make “chromebook-opengles-driver-installer” like package which would grab binaries from ChromeOS (I did such for week35) or will fetch them from network. Feel free to do it. Once you will get it working I can put it into Samsung Chromebook PPA.

Multimedia decoding

Other thing is hardware accelerated multimedia decoding (maybe also encoding). Under ChromeOS it was done with OpenMAX stuff. Google even had some binaries available but they crashed badly under Ubuntu.

How situation looks today? No idea as I did not had time for Chromebook stuff in last months.

This year I spent Easter in other way than in past years. Instead of staying with the family I went for demoscene party — Revision 2013 in Saarbrücken.

Please note (RSS readers mostly) that this post will contain many YouTube videos embedded. Please go to my blog to have them properly displayed.

Friday

Took us 12 hours to get there (mostly due to waiting on TXL and FRA airports) but we managed to be at party place around 19:00 on Friday. Registered, met friends and went to Kirchberg Hotel to drop bags.

Hotel has two stars but was perfectly fine for such trip as our. Clean bed, good breakfast, quiet place (except church bells at 10:00 on Sunday). All just ~2km from E-Werk where Revision took place.

Back to party, more people to meet, discuss a bit with guys from ARM Ltd about Samsung Chromebook, Cortex-A15, Mali etc. One guy joined with his Chromebook and recognized me when I asked “may I fry your speakers?” :D

Timetable listed one interesting thing: “Curio’s 2012 Essentials” which was ~1 hour long set of PC demos from previous year. It was nice as I was totally out of PC scene so was able to check how it looks.

Taxi to hotel was just 6€ ;D

Saturday

Attended “How to start writing compilers without a Ph.D” seminar as it sounded interesting to me. And it was ;) Video below:

Also had discussion with ARM guys about presenting not only technical demos (like Unreal Engine one) but also to show some demoscene productions. Soon “Beginnings” by Elude started on one of Nexus 10 tablets and was working nice. But coder who wrote it was not so happy about that when we discussed that later… I think that it would be a good thing for ARM Mali team to get some good demoscene groups to write demos for Android platform to amaze people with nice looking productions. ARM even had seminar for OpenGLES 3.0 API:

But Saturday was also full of competitions. Tracked music, oldskool music (read: 8-bit mostly), photo, animation/video, game, ascii/ansi, Amiga intros, PC 4K intros, Oldskool demos (8-bit, Atari STE, Amiga 500)…

There were many entries in compos where productions from long time no see groups/people were presented. For example in oldskool demo we got “RINK A DINK REDUX” from Lemon which was astonishing:

There were also demos for Amstrad CPC, MSX1, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and other platforms. Oldskool music compo had even NES entry ;)

But it was also visible that demoscene is not full of amateurs like it was years ago. Some of videos in animation/video compo had professional level. “Lübeck 24x7x365” took 50 days of recording but was really nice:

There was a concert in the evening… Ear plugs were not strong enough for me so I spent most of time outside talking with people. Next time need to take some better hearing protectors…

Sunday

As Saturday ended really late for us and competitions were planned for 13:00 we decided to not rush and stay in bed longer :) But at around 10:00 bells in local church started their music compo so we were not able to sleep anymore.

We got music, graphics, wild and of course PC 64K intro, web browser demo/intro, Amiga demo and PC demo competitions that day.

Graphics one was won by “Double Trouble by the Royal Forces” made by forcer & prince. Huge amount of details which was not so visible on big screen as it was on a tunnel’s wall where it was hanging as few square meters photo copy.

Wild compo… Man, that was something great. From productions made for Arduino (with some shields) though ARM Cortex-M3 one to interesting hack by Dexter/Abyss which shown one view on monochrome TV and second on oscilloscope while both were connected to Composite video signal only… See it for yourself (or grab separate entries from scene.org FTP server):

Then DJ set by h0ffman (skipped by me) and clue of party — Amiga and PC demos/intros. Different quality but most of them was really good — both from technical or design view (but not always from both at same time).

But as I am not a coder I looked mostly at design and audio/video part. All those names like ‘ray matching’ etc meant nothing to me so when someone tried to explain why demo which I did not like was so great I just told similar thing ;D

Monday

Wake up, breakfast, pack, pay, go to party place. We did not manage to get there before voting ended so not voted for PC demo compo entries. Greeted those who was still present, discussed a bit and then return trip… This time just ~9 hours but next time (if there will be such) we plan to go there by car. Less time needed.

Random stuff

I liked how party was organized — it was my first such event abroad and many people told me that Revision is the last demoscene party in old style. I really liked it. Saw many different platforms like MSX1, MSX2, C= VIC20, Amstrad CPC or Videoton…

Due to Easter time shops where closed on Sunday/Monday but it was not a problem for me as there was free coffee/tea, beer/water/orange juice was available to buy at low price (2.5€ for 0.5l beer) and there was hot food served all time (like 10:00 - midnight) also not so expensive.

Weather could be better as it was cold but at least there was no snow (which we still have here).

It was also nice to see Kiero at work as he was finishing “Machinist” Amiga demo on his x86-64 laptop with WinUAE running fullscreen. I was surprised that ASUS UL30A is capable to run it fast enough.

Amount of discussions with people is probably uncountable. Chromebook, ARM, Android, Amiga, scene were just subset of topics…

Will I go there next year? Will see…