GK802 - Ubuntu oneiric preview image

For those of you waiting for a pre-built image, here goes!

If you want to find out more about our development efforts or want to contribute 

1. irc channel  #imx6-dongle on freenode
2. Kernel/Uboot Source 
3. Wiki Page
4. Google Group

I've called this a preview image because it's still work in progress. What's working:

1. New uboot - based on abrasive's (aka James Laids) excellent work.

2. GPU and VPU h/w acceleration

3. Working wifi (although performance can be below par)

4. Working internal/external SD slots.

5. Working usb ports.

Instructions:

1. Download image (thanks to miniand.com for hosting).

2. Unzip image and dd to an SD card. This image is for a 8GB SD card, however the ext4 file partition is only 3GB therefore should work on a 4GB card. Fix the partition (by expanding it) after completing the dd.

3. Download a new uboot and 'dd' to your sd card (replace <drive> with the correct value):

    sudo dd if=u-boot.imx bs=1k seek=1 of=/dev/<drive> && sync

Update: To fix the problem of sound not working, down a pre-built kernel with the fix or compile your own using the our latest kernel source. To use pre-built follow instructions below:

3a. Down the pre-built kernel with cpu frequency scaling enabled or without it and 'dd' to sd card. Replace <cpu_freq_option> with cpu_freq or no_cpu_freq depending on which file you downloaded :

    sudo dd if=uImage_3.0.35-0269_<cpu_freq_option> of=/dev/<drive> bs=1048576 seek=1 && sudo sync 

                                                   

3b. Download the kernel modules for the prebuilt kernel and copy to the sd card (replace <sd card> with mount point of your sd card:

 tar xvf modules_3.0.35-02695.tar
 cp -r modules/3.0.35-02695-ga09806b-dirty <sd card>/lib/modules

4. Place image in the internal sd card slot (you need to remove the casing to access the internal sd slot) and fingers crossed it should boot (useful to have a serial console open). The image defaults to 1280x720 screen resolution, once the desktop appears, plug-in a keboard/mouse via the usb port.

5. Next configure wifi, and it may be useful to reboot after setting wifi so that the correct time is picked up.

6. Then enjoy the desktop experience!

Unfortunately shutting down from the desktop just takes you back to the logon screen. To force a  proper shut down open a command shell and issue "sudo shutdown -P now", wait a minute or so to ensure shut down is complete and then remove the usb power cable.

To verify GPU acceleration you can run glmark2-es or es2gears. To verfiy VPU run totem with a file of your choice.

GK802 - Ubuntu Update 1 (GPU/VPU Acceleration)

Since my last post, we have made rapid progress in getting a functional kernel working on the GK802. This couldn't have been done without the invaluable contributions from rz2k (aka Dmitriy ) and abrasive (aka James Laird)  on the irc channel imx-dongle. Coupled with countless hours from myself the progress so far:

1. Wifi working.

2. External SD working

3. Matched IOMUX configuration to align with the Android image. Managed to work out how compile        C programs to run under the Android image.

4. Stripped out unnecessary device initialisation from the original HDMI dongle source.

5. Enabled EGL and GLES HW Acceleration in Ubuntu (big thanks r2zk).

6. Unity desktop I think is partially HW accelerated.

I plan to push kernel patches in the coming days. There is still a fair amount of work to do due to  thermal/CPU freq driver patches in the kernel and lack of PMIC on the GK802. 

Update: Changes are now merged into the main repo https://github.com/imx6-dongle/linux-imx. If you want to build the kernel then use imx6_gk802_defconfig.

Here's a video to demonstrate what's been achieved and how capable the IMX6Q is. In the video Firefox seems sluggish, however this is easily compensated by the fact I run glmark-es2 whilst simultaneously playing a 720p video. 

Compared to the Chinese SOC manufactures it is miles ahead in the availability of reference documentation and Linux support. The video playback is pretty impressive and I hope that we will see XBMC development commence at some point.