I didn't see these included in the Karmic root file system, so I was wondering if you guys have made them available?

We really haven't. They're not stable enough with our kernels. When they work we'll release them properly as a concern for Genesi.

Enterprising users such as Stephen Klimaszewski from Gentoo have published code from the BSPs which are freely available on the Freescale website. Anyone can get the open source portions, and compile and test them by themselves. The PowerDeveloper kernel is based on the BSP as published there.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... _Tools_Tab

Any closed source libraries we are not in any rush to provide until we can ensure that they work 100% as expected.

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Matt Sealey

Were there any peripherals in general that you're concerned with? Which ones are you experiencing instability with? Have you submitted these concerns to FSL?

Well the SCC2 driver didn't build until the very last BSP. We haven't published our kernel from that one yet. So the userspace libraries for SCC2 would have been useless.

The rest are mostly down to codecs which don't work so reliably; several common videos (different encodings of Big Buck Bunny for example) don't work properly and the ones that do, cause a strange video blinking issue which we have yet to pinpoint.

It is less common with newer kernels but may be down to the way the HDMI transmitter is hooked into the framebuffer driver.

We're constantly in contact with Freescale on the issues and most of the problems, once we find them, have been fixed in a newer BSP just released, leaving a smaller and smaller set of issues as a whole and no good reason to issue a bug report on the older ones, but until they're all fixed.. it makes it a slightly unstable, unpredictable system.

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Matt Sealey

Matt, this is not exactly encouraging.

It's the truth, what do you want, blood?

We are getting closer to an island of stability here, at which point we will release things with wild abandon (pending working out licensing dialog boxes and so on when packages are installed) but until then why would we be sending out things which are obviously not working 100%?

Without board schematics or in-depth knowledge of the iMX51 that you cannot possibly have without access to the Freescale Extranet, people finding bugs even in opensource code cannot do much to fix them. We know Freescale know the vast majority of them already, and are working on fixes.

Please be patient.

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Matt Sealey

We all love transparency, even if it hurts!
Have you realized the poetry in these words? ;-)
Is Genesi's duty to help them? Because I understand there's no other way for those guys to squash the bugs (or make workarounds), and Genesi depends to some extent in their software...
Go figure, I used to be amigan...

Yes, I did physics in college :)
We can help, but usually the opinion is that going through Genesi to get a pin value or verify some data on the board is tedious - as it is with any hardware manufacturer. I can check the schematics right now, but I also need to see your code to find what I am looking for.

A good example is an i2c problem I am working on. The IOMUX data in the PowerDeveloper kernel is basically laid into a huge table, not splitting up peripherals. In splitting and cleaning that up, I found multiple IOMUX settings for I2C2 pins. Which one is right, is up to the schematics.

Some of the pins are not named for their used function, but the default - MX51 has several "ALT" modes for pins, which can move the outputs and inputs to different peripherals. KEY_COL4 is hooked to the keypad module by default but we use it for something else (I2C2 hopefully..) so the data in the table is not entirely obvious and not well commented.. it requires a lot of cross-referencing in order to clean it up, debug it, and comment it properly.

Some of that information is NOT easily accessed from the IMX51 reference manual. There are helper spreadsheets and so on from Freescale that partners get, which most people don't have instant access to. You can bug a Freescale engineer for them, but really you are expected to already have them if you really need them....

And therein lies the problem.

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Matt Sealey