Category: Zaurus

It gives me great pleasure to announce a new release of Poky, version 3.0 (blinky). There are lots of new features in this although the biggest change is no doubt the introduction of the new look and feel known as Sato along with the new desktop, panel and Pimlico application “Tasks”. A rough summary of the changes is:

• Sato 0.1 - simple fast GTK+ based PDA/Smartfone fully featured theme and application framework
• Latest Pimlico packages (Contacts, Dates and the new Tasks)
• Matchbox Panel-2 and Matchbox Desktop 2
• Improved customised version of Puzzles
• bitbake 1.8 series based - faster and more efficient builds than ever before including multi-process build support
• Latest X.org X11 packages (X11R7.2 based)
• Package Epoch support
• Standalone/External/Prebuilt toolchain support
• Improved QEMU images including distcc support and improved integration
• Introduction of 'formfactor' - physical hardware abstraction layer
  
• GTKTerm replacing rxvt
• Linux 2.6.21 Kernel
• GTK Input Method support
• Latest oprofile including support for oprofileui, a remote control interface for oprofile.
• Improved/new profiling tools such as exmap and valgrind (qemux86 only)
• Addition of gdbserver for remote debugging
• Improved ease of image control/creation/customisation through FEATURES
• Experimental Nokia N800 and FIC-GTA01 support
• Experimental bootable x86 cd image support

Here are links to the release and images. See the poky website for more information including screenshots.

After much painful debugging, I finally found the cause of the segfaults I was seeing on EABI images, particularly with glibc 2.4/2.5. It turned out to be a cache flushing problem affecting StrongARM, XScale and ARMv6 processors. The bug must have been in the kernel for years and only triggered by the changed usage patterns in glibc 2.4/2.5.

I submitted a patch for the problem which has been accepted into the mainline kernel and will be in 2.6.20.
(http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/patches/viewpatch.php?id=4078/1, http://www.rpsys.net/openzaurus/patches/archive/xscale_cache_workaround-r1.patch). I’d recommend anyone using the affected processors to apply this patch.

My arm backtrace code has been accepted into the kernel so oprofile support for arm is complete!

The first draft of the w100fb patches have been submitted for review to linux-fbdev-devel

The c7x0 has been getting more and more sensitive to the length of time the suspend/resume button was pressed. I’ve finialy tracked this down to the suspend/resume behaviour of the keyboard driver and fixed it.