FatdogArm [CLOSED]

Puppy related raves and general interest that doesn't fit anywhere else
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jamesbond
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FatdogArm [CLOSED]

#1 Post by jamesbond »

For discussion only.

EDIT: FatdogArm alpha is now released here: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 700#721700; thus it is no longer "for discussion only" (=vapourware).
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Last edited by jamesbond on Sun 25 Aug 2013, 07:38, edited 1 time in total.
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mavrothal
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#2 Post by mavrothal »

I would be very interested in some more information.
Some time ago I had the ARM XOs booting with a modified initrd and kernel but did not go any further.
Recently I got Tinycore going on them but their armv7 repo is prectically non-existing and the armv6 repo I used is really underperforming. Also the framebuffer video driver is really poor performer.

So, to begin with what SoC is your kernel for.
Is it with hard FPU or soft FPU.
Is it full install or frugal (Aufs, Unininfs?).
Are the applications from debian, fedora etc or compiled from source (tool chain?)
Are they armv7hf?
Which xorg/video driver?
Are these enough for discussion :P
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Ray MK
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#3 Post by Ray MK »

This looks fantastic.

Could it be used on an older android smart-phone or a cheapo 7
[b]Asus[/b] 701SD. 2gig ram. 8gb SSD. [b]IBM A21m[/b] laptop. 192mb ram. PIII Coppermine proc. [b]X60[/b] T2400 1.8Ghz proc. 2gig ram. 80gb hdd. [b]T41[/b] Pentium M 1400Mhz. 512mb ram.

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#4 Post by jamesbond »

mavrothal wrote:Are these enough for discussion :P
Ah yes, of course :)
I would be very interested in some more information.
Some time ago I had the ARM XOs booting with a modified initrd and kernel but did not go any further.
That would be interesting. I think you or Mick told me that XO 1.75 uses Marvell PXA CPU or something?
So, to begin with what SoC is your kernel for.
It's for A10, that's my development platform (Mele A1000), see here: http://jamesbond3142.no-ip.org/wiki/wik ... -WikiIndex
Is it with hard FPU or soft FPU.
A10 comes with hard FPU, VFPv3 compatible, so that's what I built it for.
Is it full install or frugal (Aufs, Unininfs?).
Frugal install with AUFS and initrd. All the Fatdog64 boot features are avaialable except LVM and encrypted savefile (simply because I haven't compiled the required supporting binaries yet).
Are the applications from debian, fedora etc or compiled from source (tool chain?)
All compiled from source, although they are somewhat compatible with debian armhf (if the libs requirements are met).
Are they armv7hf?
Yes - ARMv7, optimised for Cortex-A8, with hard-float by default.
Which xorg/video driver?
I have two - generic framebuffer driver and sunxi-framebuffer driver (A10 specific). Sunxi-framebuffer driver has 2D acceleration (and 3D too, but I haven't built that one yet).

Xorg uses udev, I can plug-in my Wacom tablet and my HDMI TV becomes a large white board with mtpaint :)
Recently I got Tinycore going on them but their armv7 repo is prectically non-existing and the armv6 repo I used is really underperforming. Also the framebuffer video driver is really poor performer.
Without hardware acceleration (ok, only with that limited 2D sunxi-fb acceleration) and only armhf/neon, I can play SD video upscaled to 720p nicely (I use xine). Anything above that will stutter.

Seamonkey plays youtube's webm video like powerpoint presentation. There is no armhf Flash player available and even if there is, I would be horrified at its performance.

A10 uses Mali GPU and there are some binary blobs to make it work; and it is "down the roadmap"; but it is not so important as every ARM platform is different. At the moment I'm more interested building something which is generic enough and can easily be ported across other SoCs (apart from the kernel and bootloader - which is always SoC-specific).


Ray MK wrote:This looks fantastic.
Could it be used on an older android smart-phone or a cheapo 7
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#5 Post by Ted Dog »

Cool, I was hoping the Mele would have a new life, is it the prior version from last year or the newer quad core?

I was discussing this option with Dr from UofTX as a inexpensive device for OneSwitch (method for computer control for the very disabled) just yesterday. Currently porting the programs to 64bit (can't get keyboard keys lock, wonder if its swen related...) and the speech program espeech has been ported to ARM7.

:lol:

And what is this 622 version of fatdog you are using to compile... :shock:

I have both64bit and a Mele1000A setups if you need a 'beta' tester for 'BOTH' :wink:

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mavrothal
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#6 Post by mavrothal »

jamesbond wrote:
I would be very interested in some more information.
Some time ago I had the ARM XOs booting with a modified initrd and kernel but did not go any further.
That would be interesting. I think you or Mick told me that XO 1.75 uses Marvell PXA CPU or something?.
The XO-1.75 has an Marvell armada 610 SoC with Marvell Sheeva ARM PJ4 CPU and the XO-4 (touch!) with Marvell PXA2128 SoC with dual PJ4
jamesbond wrote: Frugal install with AUFS and initrd. All the Fatdog64 boot features are avaialable except LVM and encrypted savefile (simply because I haven't compiled the required supporting binaries yet).
Supper!
Any git or image to play with?
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#7 Post by Ted Dog »

Got me thinking, you could solve the need of a keyboard / mouse pad if we could get the Mele remote control to function as the OneSwitch (it software has a onscreen keyboard and mouse 'radar') controlled by a single button.

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#8 Post by starhawk »

I have a CX-01 Android Cloud Stick. I would *LOVE* to put Puppy on it.

If you make a FatDog for my CX-01 I *WILL* use it.

Here's links to info on that little doodad.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/06/14/ ... cortex-a5/
http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/36988-cx-01-cortex-a5/
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/22/ ... for-cx-01/
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/08/16/ ... 1-mini-pc/
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/07/18/ ... zzbird-n1/

They're actually getting a little hard-to-find on eBay now... there are stronger better faster versions but I don't have them -- or the money to get them. I wouldn't mind loaning you my CX-01 if you're in the States -- I've no use for it till it's Linux'd -- but you've got to promise me you won't brick it ;) after all, I've only got the one.

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#9 Post by jamesbond »

Ted Dog wrote:Cool, I was hoping the Mele would have a new life, is it the prior version from last year or the newer quad core?
The old one from last year. I wanted to do this since last year but got distracted by many other things.
I was discussing this option with Dr from UofTX as a inexpensive device for OneSwitch (method for computer control for the very disabled) just yesterday. Currently porting the programs to 64bit (can't get keyboard keys lock, wonder if its swen related...) and the speech program espeech has been ported to ARM7.
I have not been following the thread, but it sounds like a good initiative.
And what is this 622 version of fatdog you are using to compile... :shock:
That's "Fatdog Next", the next release of Fatdog (we (=me and kirk) eat our own dogfood, run Fatdog on my machine and experience the devastating bugs first hand, and only deliver the sanitised and clean and bug-free versions to the masses ... of course sometimes one or two bugs manage to sneak through, usually the nasty ones :P). I posted a note about it recently in the Fatdog64 thread. Mainly new kernel, new seamonkey, a few bug fixes and new sandbox & LXC. At this stage we'll be looking after kernel 3.11 before making another release.
I have both64bit and a Mele1000A setups if you need a 'beta' tester for 'BOTH' :wink:
You have 64-bit ARM setup? :shock:
he XO-1.75 has an Marvell armada 610 SoC with Marvell Sheeva ARM PJ4 CPU and the XO-4 (touch!) with Marvell PXA2128 SoC with dual PJ4
That's cool. Are they unbrickable? Can they boot from SD Card without having to flash the internal NAND/MMC storage? (like Mele)? If both are yes, any idea how I can get my hands on them? :)
Supper! Any git or image to play with?
Not yet. Let me rationalise the packages a little bit, perhaps splitting of the toolchains to devx sfs, etc.
Got me thinking, you could solve the need of a keyboard / mouse pad if we could get the Mele remote control to function as the OneSwitch (it software has a onscreen keyboard and mouse 'radar') controlled by a single button.
I haven't tested it yet but according to linux-sunxi.org, Mele's remote is detected as just another "keyboard". So in theory it is possible. But personally, as a not-disabled person, navigating using Mele's keyboard is a very frustating experience - I'd go for keyboard anytime.
I have a CX-01 Android Cloud Stick. I would *LOVE* to put Puppy on it.
Thanks starhawk for the offer. As it happens, I also have CX-01 ... and I love to have puppy there too. Unfortunately at the time being it doesn't seem to be feasible. The main problem is that it can't boot off external media, which means if you want to install Puppy you have to wipe-off the Android. Secondly, to actually do that, you need to use a Windows program .... :roll: The last information I can find is here: http://www.freaktab.com/showthread.php? ... y-Tatubias and all they got as far is to "upgrade" the Android there.

cheers
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#10 Post by starhawk »

Re: CX-01. I don't *want* android on there; without a touchscreen it's incredibly clumsy. Plus half of everything (the exciting half, predictably) expects a tablet with an accelerometer in it... not gonna happen on a CX-01. Not a pleasant experience at all! No, I'd much rather have Puppy.

If you can tell me how, I don't mind doing the actual install myself (I've got a win7 laptop that I do a lot on :oops: ) although I'll need some fairly idiot-proof instructions. I can do some pretty stupid stuff when I don't know what I'm doing ;)

Alternately, if you know where I could get something similar with an SD slot for $20 or less I'd be able to do that... but only barely.

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#11 Post by mavrothal »

jamesbond wrote:
he XO-1.75 has an Marvell armada 610 SoC with Marvell Sheeva ARM PJ4 CPU and the XO-4 (touch!) with Marvell PXA2128 SoC with dual PJ4
That's cool. Are they unbrickable? Can they boot from SD Card without having to flash the internal NAND/MMC storage? (like Mele)? If both are yes, any idea how I can get my hands on them? :)
Both yes.
Check the Contributors program and join the XO-puppy development team :wink:
If you want to do that let me know.
Supper! Any git or image to play with?
Not yet. Let me rationalise the packages a little bit, perhaps splitting of the toolchains to devx sfs, etc.
I was thinking of a pre-alpha version to test if my kernels are doing OK.
You may want to upload it somewhere and PM me.
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another tester

#12 Post by raffy »

Yay, excellent development!

You have another FatdogARM tester here.

Cubieboard, another popular build of the Allwinner SoC, must also be jumping with joy.

Yes, mavrothal, "how I can get my hands on them" is now a question about the XO. Tell us how to.*

* My elementary school [hundreds of km from here] has a pilot run of the XOs, so it will be good to work on the XO again.
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Re: another tester

#13 Post by mavrothal »

raffy wrote: Yes, mavrothal, "how I can get my hands on them" is now a question about the XO. Tell us how to.*

* My elementary school [hundreds of km from here] has a pilot run of the XOs, so it will be good to work on the XO again.
Unfortunately, XOs can be found only on ebay and they are usually XO-1s (x86 Geode CPU).
The aforementioned "Contributors Program" is the only alternative for individuals that are deemed they have something to contribute to the OLPC project, to get a (free) XO (see here to get an idea of approved requests)
Being involved with a pilot or a local deployment is certainly worthy
Of course you can buy them in lots of 100+ ( :o ) if you want to set up a pilot or something.
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#14 Post by mavrothal »

Hi jamesbond.
I can appreciate that from teaser to pleaser can take some time so I thought to get going at least with busybox.
Unfortunately I do not have a 64-bit CPU with me currently but the XO-4 can compile its kernel in ~20min :wink:
So is a toolchain with glibc-2.16/gcc-4.7.2/binutils-2.35.51 close to yours?
Can you post your busybox configure/flags?
Thx
Latter: ...or you could advise on my busybox config (attached)
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#15 Post by jamesbond »

starhawk wrote:Re: CX-01. I don't *want* android on there; without a touchscreen it's incredibly clumsy. Plus half of everything (the exciting half, predictably) expects a tablet with an accelerometer in it... not gonna happen on a CX-01. Not a pleasant experience at all! No, I'd much rather have Puppy.

If you can tell me how, I don't mind doing the actual install myself (I've got a win7 laptop that I do a lot on :oops: ) although I'll need some fairly idiot-proof instructions. I can do some pretty stupid stuff when I don't know what I'm doing ;)
I agree. For me to tell to give you idiot-proof instructions, however, I need to at least have done it once myself; which right now I'm a bit reluctant to do (since it requires me to setup Windows somewhere). I will see what I can do later, but no promises yet :)
raffy wrote:Cubieboard, another popular build of the Allwinner SoC, must also be jumping with joy.
Yes, I am considering to get Cubieboard2, though I haven't decided yet whether I'll get that or BeagleBlack instead (Odroid and Cubox are interesting too but out of question at the moment for budget reasons).
mavrothal wrote:Hi jamesbond.
I can appreciate that from teaser to pleaser can take some time so I thought to get going at least with busybox.
Unfortunately I do not have a 64-bit CPU with me currently but the XO-4 can compile its kernel in ~20min :wink:
So is a toolchain with glibc-2.16/gcc-4.7.2/binutils-2.35.51 close to yours?
Can you post your busybox configure/flags?
Ah ok, you don't need 64-bit CPU at all. I'm attaching the bbconfig static busybox and glibc-busybox (dynamically linked); the static busybox is for initrd and the dynamic busybox is for the main SFS. Busybox in the main SFS is used to supplement missing tools and binaries (e.g, if you haven't installed net-tools then busybox will provide ifconfig, netstat etc) -- if you have all these tools then dynamic busybox isn't strictly necessary (I like to have them). My busybox is from git July 2013; patched with guess_fstype applet patch you can find from the Programming thread (from Ibidem); if you can't find it don't worry just use the standard Puppy's guess_fstype instead.

The busybox config I attached is over-spec'ed, Fatdog initrd doesn't actually need all these applets. I enabled them just because I like to have all these tools handy when I need it. You can easily trim it down to the basic applets if you.

The static busybox is cross-compiled using Aboriginal's cross-compiler 1.2.3; the glibc-busybox I compiled much later using the native compiler after I got the native compiler working. You can use any native compiler to compile glibc-busybox, it isn't critical.

I cross-compiled my kernel using linaro's 4.7 toolchain (which is a 32-bit tool) but there is no reason why it can't be compiled native only the machine, if it is capable enough. Linaro's toolchain is gcc 4.7.3, binutils 2.23.1, glibc 2.15; so I think yours should work too.
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dynamically linked busybox config
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#16 Post by mavrothal »

jamesbond wrote:My busybox is from git July 2013; patched with guess_fstype applet patch you can find from the Programming thread (from Ibidem);
I guess you are referring to the guess_fs applet.
If so do you also link guess_fstype to guess_fs for the puppy init to work or you change the init?
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#17 Post by jamesbond »

Mav,

I don't do either, in fact I changed the patch to rename the applet to guess_fstype; the patches are attached.

This is the version of busybox that I use as the base for these patches; http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/?id ... 73eab27e1c ; they have moved on quite a bit after that (e.g the fixed the awk bug; they also included f2fs detection now, etc).

cheers!
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#18 Post by mavrothal »

jamesbond wrote:Mav,

I don't do either, in fact I changed the patch to rename the applet to guess_fstype; the patches are attached.

This is the version of busybox that I use as the base for these patches; http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/?id ... 73eab27e1c ; they have moved on quite a bit after that (e.g the fixed the awk bug; they also included f2fs detection now, etc).

cheers!
Ah, OK.
You have to try to upstream it. With the current HEAD fails badly without it you miss the improvements.
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#19 Post by jamesbond »

mavrothal wrote:Ah, OK.
You have to try to upstream it. With the current HEAD fails badly without it you miss the improvements.
Okay, Ibidem said the same thing too. I suppose I should do that :)
I just tried to apply the guess_fstype patch to the latest busybox-git, it works --- all you need to do is take the "guess_fstype.c" diff itself, and delete the rest of the (now obsolete) diffs. Busybox built cleanly and I've got the guess_fstype applet working.
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#20 Post by jamesbond »

Ted Dog wrote:Got me thinking, you could solve the need of a keyboard / mouse pad if we could get the Mele remote control to function as the OneSwitch (it software has a onscreen keyboard and mouse 'radar') controlled by a single button.
I can confirm now that Mele's remote works as "keyboard" as far as the OS is concerned. The module to load is sun4ir (the name may change, linux-sunxi team is currently restructuring a lot of the kernel stuff). Once loaded, anything you press on the remote will show up as a key ("t", "3", etc) - including the directional arrows. So it's a matter of mapping the scancodes to keycodes using udev rules (keymap) and with the right software to intercept the input, it should be possible to use it for OneSwitch application that you're building.

cheers!
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