Every year's end-of-winter highlight starts next Tuesday: Embedded
World 2018, and like every year, it is our main trade show and a good
opportunity to meet many long-term customers in person. This year's
highlight of the highlight: We have Etnaviv and Wayland running on MX8M!
For us, the whole i.MX 8M story started shortly before Christmas holidays
in late 2017, when we got the first piece of evaluation hardware from NXP.
Fortunately, the friendly folks in the Etnaviv community had already
started working on public documentation of GC7000 (the new 3D IP block
in i.MX 8M), so we could directly focus on the kernel side.
In mid January 2018, the Pengutronix graphics team member Lucas Stach
started working on Etnaviv kernel support for GC7000, and it turned out
that it was a quick job to get initial support for the 3D unit up and
running. The demo you can see at Embedded World is running Wayland on a
Full-HD HDMI monitor, with weston-terminal, glmark and GStreamer
decoding a 720p video (entirely in software so far). It was developed in
roughly four weeks…
While we are quite enthusiastic about the quick results right now, you
should also be aware of the fact that there is still a long way to go
until i.MX 8M is equally well supported in mainline as i.MX6 is. For example,
although you can of course see the demo output on the monitor, the whole
display scanout driver will be a lot of work until being ready for
mainline. Fortunately for us, the developers at NXP already wrote a DRM
driver in their enablement BSP (in previous years the display drivers were
based on the legacy framebuffer driver infrastructure). This was one of
the reasons why we could get output in that short amount of time; however,
the output unit supports many interesting features like eDP,
parallel displays, MIPI-DSI and HDMI, so drivers which fulfill our high
quality standards for the mainline kernel need to be done right.
Bringing the scanout driver to mainline quality will be one of our tasks
for the upcoming months. Fortunately, the first customers will be ready
with their hardware soon: as all of our work is driven by customers who
care about operating system quality while getting their devices ready
for production, it will give a great boost for MX8M support in the
mainline kernel.
Being able to do these kind of kernel support is of course always a
community thing, as we are standing on the shoulders of giants! Thanks
to Wladimir van der Laan for his great documentation and userspace OpenGL
implementation work, thanks to the NXP folks for providing hardware and
enablement code, thanks to VeriSilicon for a great family of GPUs, and
thanks to C.H. for you-know-what-I-mean 😀
We have several other demos, like:
Fully Open Source Automotive Grade Linux demo with Yocto + Etnaviv
i.MX6 based dual-head ATEX camera with OpenGL video transformation
Unter dem Motto "Voll verteilt" finden die Chemnitzer Linux Tage auch 2022 im virtuellen Raum
statt.
Wie auch im letzten Jahr, könnt ihr uns in der bunten Pixelwelt des
Workadventures treffen und auf einen Schnack über Linux, Open Source,
oder neue Entwicklungen vorbei kommen.
Wir wollen zum Bundesweiten Digitaltag am 18.6.2021 das Thema "Smarte
Städte" ein bisschen von der technischen Seite beleuchten, aber keine
Angst: es bleibt für alle verständlich.
On Tuesday, 25th and Wednesday, 26th, the 3rd edition of the Yocto Project Virtual Summit took place on the internet. With a fair ticket price of 40$ Pengutronix developers Jan Lübbe and Enrico Jörns got a 2-day long wild ride through the latest features, workflows and experiences with the Yocto Project.
Enabling the graphics output pipeline on the i.MX8M Plus (i.MX8MP for short),
is the most recent example on how open-source and upstream driver support for
GPU and display engines can reduce effort and risk in a new project.