Maverick, Smarttop/Smartbook kernels

All Efika MX Smarttop and MX Smartbooks are now shipping with a pre-release Ubuntu Maverick with Xfce. Source filesystems are available on PowerDeveloper.

Also shipping today: the Smartbook kernel (-efikasb, also a pre-release) and an update to the Smarttop kernel (-efikamx) built from the same point in the git tree. This is in another branch - efikasb-10.07.11.

These kernels match the Maverick support. In this sense installing them on top of Karmic systems is a bad idea. It will produce an unbootable system unless you find a way to not have udev and upstart mount their own /dev and subordinate filesystems. We will make an update in a little while that fixes this for older Linux distributions.

Known issues so far:

• on Smarttop some DVI monitors again don't work. We are still investigating solutions which work on ALL systems
• on Smartbook there is a ~5 pixel blank at the end of the panel and the entire display is shifted up slightly
  
• Default kernel ships with devtmpfs enabled which means any systems before Ubuntu Lucid (i.e. all previously shipping with Karmic) are recommended NOT to update. We are investigating a solution to make Karmic work with it, and a kernel update for the meantime
  
• Smartbook battery driver occasionally doesn't report "current_avg" properly
• Smartbook lid close event automatically suspends the system, but when it comes back all USB devices are dead. Possibly needs a udev script to handle this.
  
• No flash-kernel package support for EfikaMX in Maverick yet so no initramfs created automatically.
• 2010-09-28 TO2 boards still have SD card detection problems (steev from Gentoo is looking into this last time I checked).
  

So, if you're not going to be running Maverick, the kernel you have (2.6.31-008 or 2.6.31.14 previous release) will work fine for you. Don't update with the standard kernel, get the "nodevtmpfs" version if you're using Karmic.

Major and minor fixes depending on how you look at it:

• Several bugs with with the internal variable "pixclk_limit" have been fixed whereby a user with a 1280x720@60 mode set would find that it would corrupt the display after a few blanks or a few hours of runtime. This manifested itself either as garbage on the display for the bottom 3rd of the monitor, or a lockup, or both.
• The kernel now supports a real 32-bit display mode but needs a recompile to activate it. The Smartbook only has a 16-bit display controller so it is probably better to run in 16-bit and let the OS dither and manage the display, as 32-bit direct mode will cause significant banding.
  
• block IO scheduler now defaults to "noop" since having CFQ was soaking CPU cycles without giving any benefit (scheduling block IO to take advantage of "closer" blocks is meaningless on an SSD).
• ramzswap is back in lieu of being able to include zram.
• oprofile is enabled in the default configuration. You need to manually load the module before you run oprofile.
• faster kernel memcpy and kernel preemption enabled
  
• Several ARM kernel fixes due for 2.6.35 and 2.6.36 backported
• RT2870 driver is less chatty (no dmesg lines full of empty #)
• CRC32 performance optimization meant for 2.6.35 backported

The Maverick filesystems are current as of the freeze implemented before the Maverick beta 2. You can find them at Linux Support. The Kernels are available at Kernel Support.

UPDATE 2010-09-27: to boot the Smartbook from SD card you need to make a "boot.scr" by making a small text file (the simplest can be "run bootcmd_sdhc") and running a command line as so:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -a 0 -e 0 -T script -C none -n "Boot SDHC" -d myscript.txt boot.scr

A U-Boot unification for both platforms that relies on boot.scr for everything (thus letting you have full control over everything from the Linux side, and preconfigured scripts) is coming soon. If anyone has any ideas for preconfigured, board-specific environment variables (such as console="ttymxc0,115200" or so) that can be appended to bootargs or make scripting easier, we are all ears :)

UPDATE 2010-09-28: The Xfce Maverick is mislabeled "maverick-final" - it is not the final Maverick (not released for another 2 weeks..) nor our final update on the matter. However it is the final version for currently shipping products and will be on every new unit. I hope that clarifies it.