The following Projects will be approved today. Could these 5 developers please confirm their addresses.

UPDATE: any developer that already has a board who wishes to receive a serial board, PLEASE contact me personally.
I also have a curious list of people who I am absolutely sure got a board already, but have no approved project. Either way, the scope of their projects really relies on the ability to fully use the processor (for instance hardcore Linux distribution building which may require iMX515 TO3).

They are:
The following projects will NOT be approved. This is detailed with the project in the list:

Any other project is simply not technically or temporally feasible right now ("port FreeBSD") and will not be approved for that reason, but the above have specific nits that had to be addressed.

Thank you to all the developers who contributed project ideas, congratulations to those who got approved.

And now, a word out to any project developers who have already been approved, already have original Efika MX systems and need a new one for reasons of NEON optimization or other chipset issues: please contact me personally (matt@genesi-usa dot com) and we'll work something out.

Laurent Guerby and Stephen Klimaszewski have had their projects promoted to Power Projects because of the great work they've done.

Any new developers wanting to post new ideas please follow the iMX515 Project Guidelines before posting, and use the rejection examples above as how not to do it :)

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Matt Sealey

Hi, Matt!

Thanks for the update!
I wonder why the FreeBSD porting project is not feasible?

+1

OK, I know, there is no chance to get the binary only parts released for FreeBSD, but the little machine is already quite impressive without 3D or movie acceleration...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

The person who would port FreeBSD would also be committed to supporting it.

Isn't FreeBSD like 100% x86/AMD64?

No, it supports MIPS, SPARC64, PowerPC and ARM just fine.
We already support several ARM platforms, and I'm one
of developers.

Once I had it running on one of my Sheeva Plugs, so ARM definitely works.

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

What is the stance on pre-compiled, closed source, proprietary drivers in the FreeBSD camp?

I think I recall some annoyance about various closed, proprietary controllers in the Marvell Discovery II chip used in the Pegasos2, but maybe my memory fails on that...

I never heard any objection against for example the nVidia driver, which generates a lot of heat in the Linux world. It works nice and stable.

Neko clarified the situation on IRC, so hopefully we will end up with a FreeBSD port, but not now...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

There are basically two reasons why it's not a good idea right now: one, we can't release any schematics so your only source of pin settings or any hardware information is to read the Linux source code. I am not sure BSD source code goes well with deriving it from GPL code..

Secondly, when we release Aura for the MX5x line, all your work on drivers etc. is going to be bordering on useless for the Efika MX. While we want better support for the iMX515 in general, there is no benefit to Genesi whatsoever in having it be a close to metal driver implementation that we are going to basically deprecate on our platforms.

I don't want anyone to feel like they're wasting their time on it, and in any case, the actual users of ARM FreeBSD are pretty small. On PowerPC it was a little more relevant - PPC is a supported platform in 8.0 (don't recall if it even works on Pegasos though). ARM is not. The amount of development and testing that came from Zero Real Users while it was not a supported platform made it more difficult.

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Matt Sealey

What's aura?
As I understand it's some kind of bootloader,
in which case I don't understand how it is related
to drivers development? Yep, there will be pin
initialization, but we usually do it anyway to be
independent of the bootloader.

Do you sell these devices btw? Is it possible to
buy one?

Aura is a firmware (actually, it should be OpenFirmware compilant) similar to BIOSes on regular PCs, but Aura is more like what BIOS was originally supposed to be, before it became crippled by wrong decisions and backward compatibility with errors of the past. It's a hardware abstraction layer aspiring to handle all hardware stuff, exposing only high level interface to the OS (I've heard something about OpenGL support etc.)

With Aura, you don't need a bootloader, because OpenFirmwares, in contrast to BIOSes, can handle filesystems and ELF binaries, while PCs simply run anything inside the MBR, which in turn boots some stage-2 loader, which loads the bootloader, which finally prepares the initrd and boots the kernel. Makes your life simpler, huh?

*DISCLAIMER: I'm not an employee of Genesi, I don't own an Efika MX and I have no experience with ARM, so your mileage may vary. On the original Efika, Aura is much simpler and is typically used just for basic setup and booting.

AFAIK, Aura goes beyond this, like this, resulting in something like this. At least that is how I understood things...

;-)