Community-maintained 3.14.16 kernel for i.MX6 devices

Community-maintained 3.14.16 kernel for i.MX6 devices

[Carlos Rafael Giani]

Hello,

I want to take a few minutes and mention in this mailing list the 
amazing work of Jon Nettleton, Russell King, and others. This is 3.14 
kernel, with FSL patches, upstream patches, memleak fixes, and numerous 
improvements for stability that are not present in the linux-imx 
kernels. The target hardware for this has been the SolidRun product line 
so far (since the developers' time is limited, and they don't have every 
imx6 device under the sun to test with), but putting other devicetree 
files in it should not be difficult. Initial tests on SolidRun hardware 
show noticeable improvements.

To list a few enhancements:
* FEC ethernet performance, rated by Freescale at 470 Mbps; with Russell 
King's improvements pushed to 630+ down and 500+ up
* lower I/O latencies
* SDHC patchset for better UHS-I support
* residue support for SDMA with FSL's custom firmware integrated to work 
with HDMI and optical SPDIF
* higher DMA and GPU efficiency in general
* and of course the upstream 3.14 improvements over 3.10

VPU and GPU have also successfully been tested with this kernel.

The repository is available at: 
https://github.com/linux4kix/linux-linaro-stable-mx6   . Use the 
"linux-linaro-lsk-v3.14-mx6" branch.

Some members of the community are in IRC channels. One is #cubox in the 
Freenode IRC network. Another is #imx6-devel (also in the Freenode network).

Comments welcome!

cheers

Re: Community-maintained 3.14.16 kernel for i.MX6 devices

[John Weber]

On 8/19/14, 1:19 PM, Carlos Rafael Giani wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I want to take a few minutes and mention in this mailing list the amazing work 
> of Jon Nettleton, Russell King, and others. This is 3.14 kernel, with FSL 
> patches, upstream patches, memleak fixes, and numerous improvements for 
> stability that are not present in the linux-imx kernels. The target hardware 
> for this has been the SolidRun product line so far (since the developers' time 
> is limited, and they don't have every imx6 device under the sun to test with), 
> but putting other devicetree files in it should not be difficult. Initial 
> tests on SolidRun hardware show noticeable improvements.
This looks pretty awesome.  Thanks for sharing.  What versions of SolidRun HW is 
it supporting?
>
> To list a few enhancements:
> * FEC ethernet performance, rated by Freescale at 470 Mbps; with Russell 
> King's improvements pushed to 630+ down and 500+ up
> * lower I/O latencies
> * SDHC patchset for better UHS-I support
> * residue support for SDMA with FSL's custom firmware integrated to work with 
> HDMI and optical SPDIF
> * higher DMA and GPU efficiency in general
> * and of course the upstream 3.14 improvements over 3.10
>
> VPU and GPU have also successfully been tested with this kernel.
Cool! What GPU and VPU tests have you been running?
>
> The repository is available at: 
> https://github.com/linux4kix/linux-linaro-stable-mx6   . Use the 
> "linux-linaro-lsk-v3.14-mx6" branch.
I'll have to mess with this soon and check it out.
>
> Some members of the community are in IRC channels. One is #cubox in the 
> Freenode IRC network. Another is #imx6-devel (also in the Freenode network).
>
> Comments welcome!
>
> cheers

Re: Community-maintained 3.14.16 kernel for i.MX6 devices

[Rabeeh Khoury]

On 08/20/2014 12:47 AM, John Weber wrote:
>
> On 8/19/14, 1:19 PM, Carlos Rafael Giani wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to take a few minutes and mention in this mailing list the 
>> amazing work of Jon Nettleton, Russell King, and others. This is 3.14 
>> kernel, with FSL patches, upstream patches, memleak fixes, and 
>> numerous improvements for stability that are not present in the 
>> linux-imx kernels. The target hardware for this has been the SolidRun 
>> product line so far (since the developers' time is limited, and they 
>> don't have every imx6 device under the sun to test with), but putting 
>> other devicetree files in it should not be difficult. Initial tests 
>> on SolidRun hardware show noticeable improvements.
> This looks pretty awesome.  Thanks for sharing.  What versions of 
> SolidRun HW is it supporting?
Both HummingBoard and CuBox-i (all variants and versions).
Internally the MicroSOM is developed as a dtsi that can be included by a 
vendor carrier board.

Re: Community-maintained 3.14.16 kernel for i.MX6 devices

[Carlos Rafael Giani]

On 08/19/2014 11:47 PM, John Weber wrote:
>
> On 8/19/14, 1:19 PM, Carlos Rafael Giani wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to take a few minutes and mention in this mailing list the 
>> amazing work of Jon Nettleton, Russell King, and others. This is 3.14 
>> kernel, with FSL patches, upstream patches, memleak fixes, and 
>> numerous improvements for stability that are not present in the 
>> linux-imx kernels. The target hardware for this has been the SolidRun 
>> product line so far (since the developers' time is limited, and they 
>> don't have every imx6 device under the sun to test with), but putting 
>> other devicetree files in it should not be difficult. Initial tests 
>> on SolidRun hardware show noticeable improvements.
> This looks pretty awesome.  Thanks for sharing.  What versions of 
> SolidRun HW is it supporting?

All of them. All CuBox-i and HummingBoard variants.

>>
>> To list a few enhancements:
>> * FEC ethernet performance, rated by Freescale at 470 Mbps; with 
>> Russell King's improvements pushed to 630+ down and 500+ up
>> * lower I/O latencies
>> * SDHC patchset for better UHS-I support
>> * residue support for SDMA with FSL's custom firmware integrated to 
>> work with HDMI and optical SPDIF
>> * higher DMA and GPU efficiency in general
>> * and of course the upstream 3.14 improvements over 3.10
>>
>> VPU and GPU have also successfully been tested with this kernel.
> Cool! What GPU and VPU tests have you been running?

Jon Nettleton, I, and others have been running XBMC with VPU 
acceleration, Chromium with EGL-based drawing enabled + with my VPU 
patches (which I will release here in a few days) running HTML5 Canvas 
and WebGL tests, and gstreamer-imx with the EGL-based video sink that 
uses the Vivante direct textures. Using the jellyfish test files: 
http://jell.yfish.us/ , XBMC has shown to play h264 bitrates up to 100 
Mbps (higher ones exhibit framedrops).