Marcin Juszkiewicz

At FOSDEM 2009 I grabbed one Vortex86SX based device — Koala Nano PC which is available at Koan software. Device came with Ångström distribution and was running 2.6.26 kernel. I wanted to get something more fresh on it and after some fighting I booted 2.6.29-rc5 kernel today.

Device use Vortex86SX SoC which is based on 486SX core. Yes — this is x86 machine without FPU. Overall speed of that is… nearly not existing.

First benchmark which came to my mind was “hdparm -T /dev/sda”. Results were dramatic: 9-13 MB/s for cached reads (with 133MHz memory and 300MHz cpu). I decided to compare against other devices:

But remember that this test is not so good for benchmarking — I am preparing better set of tests to really compare speed of devices. So far it contains openssl speed and MP3 encoding/decoding.

But device has also few nice things. Everything is integrated so 12x12cm box is enough to keep everything inside. It has ATA controller, FastEthernet, graphics based on XGI core (with accelerated framebuffer able to do 1680x1050 resolution) and working USB. There is a place to put 2.5” HDD inside (normally it boots from CompactFlash card), second Ethernet or WiFi are available options…

But what is use for such slow device? There are lot of ARM based ones which offer similar (or better) functionality and are faster… But wait — there is one use: event displays as this machine has nicely working framebuffer (I got even 1680x1050 resolution).

UPDATE: added results from iBook G3 300MHz and some other machines.

During this year FOSDEM Bug Labs gave 4 BUG Starter Kits for people. Two were given for best ideas of application/module/way of using BUG — here Ken and Peter selected best entries. Other two were possible to win by donating FOSDEM.

I already knew two of those lucky guys. If you are one of other ones then I want to tell that I have Handylink connectors which can be used to build serial cables for BUG. If someone wants to also have Ethernet then all signals are in connector too — just proper RJ45 socket needs to be added.

How to get Handylink connector from me? Mail me with your address and I will send you one connector (with cable ending in just wires) by normal post. No costs for You even — whole package costs me ~1€ so I do not need return of costs.

About 2 years ago I started to work (as contractor) for OpenedHand as full time Poky developer (I did not worked on kernel/applications — just Poky itself). During that time we made few releases, and last of them (‘elroy’) was prepared but never got released (it is present on OH servers anyway). I also worked on upgrading systems used by OH clients.

Now I work for other companies and one of them (Bug Labs) use Poky. We use last official release (‘pinky’) which shows it’s age so we bumped some components to newer versions to get some additional software built. During that we had to fork some classes/recipes to make needed changes. Those changes were available only in Bug Labs repository and I decided to review all of them to get as much as possible merged back into Poky.

I created single patches and started to show them to Richard Purdie to get them accepted. It was hard sometimes but I understand why — there are strict policies for backports in Poky (everything backported has to be present in ‘trunk’ for example). After some of our changes got accepted he created ‘poky-contrib’ repository and gave me access to make it easier in future.

Since then I created few more backports/fixes and all of them were merged. I do not have to show him every patch separately — it is just “please pull” mails to Poky mailing list or similar discussions via Jabber.

Having possibility to easy sharing changes is great thing.

Some time ago I got AT91SAM9263-EK board which was given by Atmel company. It is not first developer board which I use but first which I own ;)

Currently I run 2.6.28 kernel on it and have a problem with audio as it works only via OSS emulation and OOPS when ALSA is used directly. I tried 2.6.20 and 2.6.29-rc2 but problem was the same.

Today I moved from nfsroot to root on NAND flash. But this time I used UBIFS instead of JFFS2 (which I used in past on devices). Kernel is still fetched from TFTP server but I will change that later (there is a space on flash still). I have to admit that my old setup (tftp kernel + nfsroot) is really handy for rapid development — no need to copy anything to device, no need to remember about syncing when RESET key is pressed etc.

Next plans for board? Not defined yet but I know that I will use it for quite long time as main development platform.

There are few methods of adding software into rootfs. You can copy binaries but you can also go better way by using packages. I know that this can be strange experience for some people (which are used to systems which generates only binaries) but in OpenEmbedded world effect of software build is set of packages which can be used to generate final rootfs image.

First thing to check is which package contains needed binary. It is easier if package name has binary name (like ‘alsa-utils-aplay’ which contains ‘aplay’ command) but it is not always so easy. Hopefully OpenEmbedded generates ‘Packages.filelist’ file in ‘tmp/deploy/glibc/ipk/’ subdirectories. If they are empty (common situation) they need to be recreated.

To generate them user needs to remove ‘Packages*’ files from all directories and call bitbake package-index command. When command finishes ‘Packages.filelist’ files should contain all informations — for example ‘update-inetd’ command line looks like this

update-inetd netbase:armv6:./usr/sbin/update-inetd

The format is simple:

BINARY-NAME PACKAGE:ARCH:PATH-TO-BINARY

So when package name is known we need to transfer package into device. This part depends on device so I will not elaborate on it.

Installing package is simple: opkg install package.ipk. But copying single packages can result in frustration called ‘dependency hell’ (package require another package which require another etc). To check which packages will be required the easiest way is dpkg-deb -I package.ipk (as IPK packages are compatible with DEBs).

Better way is to use repositories of packages — command simplify to opkg update;opkg install package (users of desktop Linux distributions can compare it with apt-get or yum). If you built Ångström distribution then your rootfs already contains all informations needed to use packages from repositories. For other distros user needs to define them by hand.

Repository informations are stored in ‘/etc/opkg/*-feed.conf’ files. Format is simple:

src/gz NAME URL

Example:

src/gz base http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/2008/ipk/glibc/armv5te/base

Instead of ‘src/gz’ also ‘src’ can be used — it will fetch uncompressed ‘Packages’ file instead of gzipped one.

When repositories are defined installing software is easy: opkg update;opkg install package will fetch package and all it’s dependencies and then will install them into rootfs.

I hope that this will simplify that task for some people.

Nearly two years ago I wrote about end of Zaurus production. This news ended on many websites around the globe (mostly without quoting source). But it was not end — Sharp was producing Zaurus clamshells from time to time during those two years.

In December 2008 there was another set of news that Sharp ends Zaurus production. This time it looks like real end. Marc from TRISoft told on OESF forum: “Last production run was March 2008. And we’re now out of stock with new units. Looks like it’s now really over and out.”

I ended my work on Zaurus machines about year ago. OpenZaurus was ended, I had job to do and other devices to support. But still from time to time I used my c760 for some debug sessions (usually in cases where QEMU was not enough). With serial cable and wifi card it was good substitute of developer board.

Today I got Atmel AT91SAM9263-EK board. Will work on it on Monday and it will be my main testing/development platform for some time. Probably next will be BeagleBoard or other OMAP3 based device.

Today I talked with Dodji Seketeli about misc things and noticed that I started 10 year of using Debian GNU/Linux.

First attempts were on my Amiga 1200 equipped with Apollo 1240/40 expansion board (I had 32/48/64MB of RAM on it) and Fast-ATA controller. After installation of “slink” I was playing with system and then moved to “potato”. In Polish Amiga magazine “eXec” I put my article about installing Debian on Amiga systems and also updated “potato” official installation guide. Those were crazy times. All I had was VGA mono text console because running X11 on AGA graphics chipset resulted in very slow display so it was unusable for any serious use. But I learnt lot of things which I was not able to learn on my user accounts on misc x86 Linux boxes. For example with my friend we connected his Commodore 128D via serial line and used to do email/www/irc from it (via serial->ssh connection).

It was also first time when I used cross-compiler — I used PentiumII based Linux machine to build Amiga (m68k) kernels. It gave nice speedup (also due to much faster harddisk interface).

In 2001 I sold my Amiga system and moved to x86 land. Here amount of available Linux distributions was much wider (for Amiga/m68k only Debian was available) but as I knew Debian I decided to stick with it. After years I have to admit that it was one of my best decisions when it comes to computers.

I even used Debian on 386sx based PC with 5MB of memory — it was nice terminal to my main box :)

Why Debian and not Red Hat/Mandriva/LFS/Gentoo? I think that this is due to DFSG and that license stuff is very good solved. As a result I do not have to check license of application if I want to hack it. I only need to check does it is in “main” part of repository.

OK, some people can say that Debian has very long release cycle… But I use “sid” (aka “unstable”) not releases (aka “stable”) so the only thing which touch my systems is sometimes lack of newest software (but usually it lands in “experimental” branch).

2008 is ending. As before it was very good year. I have very nice daughter, our family has new flat. My company has clients with interesting projects.

January

• Bought Nokia N810 tablet. Had to do this in UK store because Nokia does not sell them in Poland.
• Released “Hrw Big blue” — my version of “Big blue” WordPress theme. No support any more for it as I stopped using it.

February

• My daughter Mira was born — she is cute ;)
• I bought car — Opel Astra combi 1997 is more then enough for us.
• Donated my old collie to Thomas Kunze to help improving Linux 2.6 support on this small beast.
• Created Polish regional settings package for Maemo OS2008. It also shown some bugs in Maemo itself.
• Wrote my palmtops story which require updating as I have few devices more now.
• Offered Zaurus c7x0 leather case for free. No one wanted it ;(
• Wrote few WordPress plugins: Recent Comments and Meta — I still use them.

March

• Poky Linux 3.1 (codename ‘pinky’) was released. I am providing support for systems based on it.
• IPKG finally died so we switched to maintained OPKG tool to manage packages.
• Cursed a bit during testing of Maemo media players. Recently I tried few more and still use default one.

April

• First April post about moving to London got amazing response. But it was only joke.
• Got N800 emulation working. Too bad that I was not allowed to distribute “config.mtd” file which made it possible. Later I discovered which flag needs to be reset and added N810 emulation infos.
• Created Polish keymap for QWERTY keyboard of N810 — thanks goes to Jiri Benc for his “ukeyboard” package. No thanks goes to Nokia Maemo team for not making it easy.
• Wrote what do I think about Maemo closed components which makes this nice device not so nice.
• Wrote how to make BitBake based builds faster — handy on multi-core systems.

May

• I was on LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. It was great to meet friends again. Thanks go to Zecke as he provided me free tickets and sleeping place. I still have working liquid powered clock which I got there.
• Replaced my desktop with new one — it is nice to have more CPU power especially when lot of builds needs to be done.
• Defined myself as developer not programmer
• Tried to use N810 for car navigation and failed. Bought TomTom One few months later (works great).

June

• Played with connecting USB devices to N810 tablet — all thanks to USB gender changer adapter which I got from Keesj during LinuxTag.
• Started wondering which phone to choose as next cellphone — now I know that next will be Symbian (Nokia E71 looks very interesting as phone).
• Again was hit by crappiness of ATI RS48x graphics chipset — now this is not my problem as I added NVidia Geforce 6600GT inside and gave whole machine to my youngest brother (it replaced 5 years old AthlonXP desktop).

July

• I had 0x20 birthday — got awesome present from friend — puzzle with C code which rendered picture with greetings.
• GUADEC 2008 was great event. Istanbul is nice city worth spending more time. But at least I visited some places ;)
• Wrote a bit about using Poky SDK to build software — this apply also to any OpenEmbedded based SDK of course.
• Also wrote about packaged staging and what it gives — generally it can speed up repeating builds. I used it to make “build each recipe from scratch” builds of Poky — lot of dependencies were added into recipes as result.

August

• Intel acquired OpenedHand — I got job offer in UK but decided to not move. It was nice to visit London again, too bad that I lacked time to see anything (as usual). The whole trip was crazy (have you ever travelled on the night bus standing for 4 hours straight?)
• We visited my parents and I was asked (again) what exactly I do for living. So I answered and my mother understood.
• I resolved problem with Nokia N8x0 tablets emulation — one flag needs to be unset to make Maemo boot in QEMU.

September

• We moved to Szczecin, Poland — new flat == separate room for my work.
• Maemo Summit — nice event, lot of Maemo developers/users, met old friends, gave presentation about Maemo in QEMU emulation — people asked questions, I tried to answer.
• As my company ended second year I decided to drop “HaeRWu” part from it’s name (it was too hard to pronounce for people).

October

• End of my work for OpenedHand — it was good time and I miss atmosphere of that company.
• Started working as contractor for Bug Labs Inc. company - their device is interesting. They use Poky ‘pinky’ as base of their system.
• OpenEmbedded project migrated from Monotone to GIT so I started to merge interesting things from Poky (lot left still to merge).
• As one of good things in OpenedHand was buildbot I decided to start my own one on home machine.

November

• Unpacked Progear webpad to check how recent kernels work on it and update it’s configuration in OpenEmbedded a bit.

December

• Moved to juszkiewicz.com.pl domain — it was 2rd domain change since I started this blog. All old addresses redirect to proper one.
• Bought tickets and hotel reservation for FOSDEM 2009 event — I missed 2008 one due to birth of Mira.
• Got Koala MiniPC 2PCI case for Alix 1c board — need to buy proper PCI riser and it will be my new router.
• Got BUG device from Bug Labs Inc..
• My working space was invaded by Poky beavers.