Releases for 22nd December 2009 - U-Boot, Kernel .31, Installer

Announcing doing final prep on the releases of the following updates for the Efika MX:

• Linux 2.6.31 release which should fix some instability problems. If you downloaded the source already please modify arch/arm/mach-mx51/mx51_efikamx.c and edit line 1132 and 1133 so that cpu_wp_auto[1] and cpu_wp_auto[2] are set. The net effect of this change is the CPU will be running at the correct voltage which solves some audio glitching and some performance problems. The source will be updated in place (no patch) so new users will get the new code. You can find this on Power Developer under Efika MX Kernel

• U-Boot 2009.01 release 1.1.7 which should improve RAM performance and a few other things. Auto-boot timeout has been increased to 10 seconds (to work around the "reboot hangs and shutdown just reboots" kernel bug, to give people time to remove the power cord) and the power LED is blue during U-Boot operation.

• Auto-flash tool which will create an SD card with rootfs, kernel and U-Boot flasher (as above). This tool and the above source code (the flasher includes binaries) are at Efika MX Firmware.

• Installer SD card image which is the result of the auto-flash tool plus the archives and installation script used to prep each machine. This has been put under Efika MX Linux along with the Karmic Root Filesystem released last week. You will need a 2GB SD card or larger (the one we shipped to everyone who ordered before 1st December will do perfectly) to use this image. Alternatively you can use a much smaller card (512MB) as the extracted rootfs is barely 300MB and the tools on top JUST about fit in 512MB, using the Auto-flash tool.

They should be up in the next few hours, instructions will be on this blog.

To install the new U-Boot you will need to do some quirky switch setting. You will need:

• Adequate Lighting (I really mean this)
• A small screwdriver (unless you already connected your serial board, in which case, you are already in there)
• A sewing needle, sturdy paperclip, or professional DIP-switch-flicking tool

If you open up your Efika MX (small panel on the bottom) you will see next to the serial cable port, 4 small DIP switches. Simply switch these to 0001 (off off off on) and the system will boot from the SD card slot. You can flash the installer image directly to an SD card, or use the Flasher tool to create this SD card yourself. You really need to grab nearly all the files seperately and put them in the right places (this is obvious if you read the "flasher" script). Please note, once it's flashed, switch them back! Or it will continue to flash the NOR Flash on every boot, and this is some wear and tear on the chip.

To switch the system back to boot from SPI, the switch settings are 1110 (on on on off) which is the exact opposite. If you have an Efika MX you've opened all the way you may notice that there is a MicroSD card slot - don't rely on this as it will be gone in a future revision, but you can boot from this (as if it were SPI flash) using switch setting 0000 (off off off off). I'll grab some photos and schematics to make this easier later :)

2.6.31 kernel

You can find the latest kernel for the Efika MX on Power Developer Platform Support. Documentation, an updated firmware, and extra drivers coming soon ;)

This kernel update should fix some of the display problems people have been having with DVI adapters and some Dell and Samsung monitors. There are a few known issues with power off and reboot (you will have to pull the power cord and reinsert it), and audio not working under Ubuntu when using GUI media player apps (such as Totem or Exaile) and we are looking into these.

The next kernel update will be shipped as a binary and a patch against this kernel version, to reduce bandwidth and hassle for developers. Hopefully we will be able to fix native panel display resolution support, enable 32-bit display modes and provide an accelerated 2D graphics driver in addition to the above fixes.

As always, in the spirit of open source development, we would appreciate any patches that fix problems you experience whenever possible.

Have fun!

Blog Blog (and clustering)

Some developers and customers have received their boards and written blogs already :)

Jeremy Olexa from Gentoo actually bought a board. Several Gentoo developers have also received boards through projects, and we're looking into a way we can provide systems for their tinderbox build farm. There are some pictures of what came in the box from Steev.. (BTW Boondock Saints, good taste in movies :)

We have also shipped a few boards to developers and some old Efika Development Edition 2.0 systems (yes, with the problems we had.. but they will still compile stuff) to create small scale clusters for this purpose, including members of the gcc team.

If anyone has any legitimate reason they could use a couple (up to 5) Efika MX systems with no cases, bootable using SD card, for this kind of work, please give us a nudge (matt@genesi-usa...). They support networking so NFS root filesystems are possible, and USB hard disks always work (please use powered drives though, as the Efika MX is not really geared for the kind of power drain on USB that those little 2.5" laptop drives need to spin up). They will need a little configuring but we are very happy to help out on this.

A note about the SD card gratuity program: we shipped all pending customer orders and quite a lot of developer systems this week, and after some frantic work from the guys at FedEx trying to find enough boxes and "Fragile" labels (thanks, guys :) we did finally run out of our stock of SD cards. Efika MX Open Client systems are still being shipped with debug boards for the forseeable future.