Hello all :)

After a *lot* of help from others (largely from the armedslack mailing list) and poking around I've finally gotten armedslack to work on the efika MX netbook.

I've put up what I've done and it can be found here;
http://andy29uk.no-ip.org/www/armedslac ... smartbook/

(please note that's my own personal server and I don't have huge bandwidth!).

All in all it works but I have just one question.

I can install the relevent armedslack packages to use X, but unfortunatly x uses the vesa/framebuffer driver which is *very* slow. I see there is an accelerated video driver availiable but a) it's propietary :-( and b) it seems *very* complicated to compile.

Is there a list of step-by-step instructions on how to compile the driver, or is there an alternative driver at all. The framebuffer/vesa X driver really slows down to a crawl once you try to start to use it in any depth (eg running firefox).

Thanks

ljones

I'll bring up your system and compile a version if I have time..
You need the X development packages listed in debian/control - but both Xorg drivers require knowledge of private GPU sources from Freescale. The new driver which is still private for now (we're working on opensourcing it) will be easier as it only depends on libc2d-imx-dev which is basically a single include file.

If you want to bump the speed of fbdev your best bet is to find a later version of libpixman; I am sure the one bundled in your distro is probably kind of old. If you go find pixman 2.23.4 or 2.23.5 it includes a lot of highly optimized NEON code that older versions don't. As an example Ubuntu Natty, 6 months old, uses 0.18.4 and Maverick uses the same version.. just going to 0.20 or 0.21 makes a hell of a difference. In fact with these versions the performance of the framebuffer is faster than the accelerated driver (at the cost of 80-90% CPU usage vs. about 10% on the GPU).

Problem, though; Firefox uses it's own Cairo and Pixman libraries internally (really, I would have thought it uses the system versions) which means it will see no immediate benefit except on the final blit-to-a-window stage.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Intresting, I'll have to give compiling up pixman a go.


The distro though is far from perfect however -- for example I had to pinch the kernel used by crux linux to make armedslack to work (the armedslack kernels are really only for kirkwood/versatile systems). How to compile a kernel for the efika mx that's beyond me(!).

ljones