[Gta04-owner] We need an Android kernel

[Paul Kocialkowski]

I'm starting to feel desperate as we still don't have any working
Android kernel. What is really important to get properly is
suspend/resume. Most of the rest can be added on pretty much any kernel
(at least I think I can do it). I am not qualified enough to debug
suspend/resume, so we can either have someone working on it or we find a
kernel where it already works.

Here is a list of some of the combinations I tried:
* Using the Rowboat 2.6.37 kernel with gta04 board, defconfig and some
drivers on top

Suspend/resume pretty much works but there is a screen flickering issue
after resume, which I can't solve. This may be because of the lcd panel
driver that does not suspend/resume the panel properly or because of
omapdss suspend/resume. It does this with both PWM and GPIO backlight.

* Using the android-3.0 common kernel with gta04 board, defconfig and
some drivers on top

Suspend/resume doesn't work and needs to be debugged and correctly
fixed.

* Using an omap4 (such as the android-omap-3.0 android omap kernel)

Kernel causes problems with DSS: I couldn't get the display to work and
it prevents the kernel from booting it seems: I dont have anything on
serial when I register DSS platform data.
Suspend/resume seemed not to work either

* Using the android-omap3-3.0 omapzoom kernel

Suspend/resume works but there is a major issue that causes lost IRQs.

I think it is better to use a 3.0 or maybe 3.4 kernel because:
* Older kernels (2.6.37 for instance) don't have the new kernel
interfaces for Android USB Gadget, which makes it difficult to use USB
Mass Storage or MTP.
* Newer kernels are not seriously used by anyone: every Android device
uses 3.0 (ICS) or 3.4 (JB). Thus, they lack support for a lot of Android
pieces (earlysuspend/earlyresume is not implemented in drivers for
instance);
* 3.0 and 3.4 are actually used, there is active development on these
versions for Android

Now the problem seems to be that nobody bothered to add Android support
to a BeagleBoard kernel (and I mean one with complete omap3 support, not
just mainline) after 2.6.37. TI teams are very clear: they won't port
omap3 devices to any newer kernel. The only exception being the omapzoom
android-omap-3.0 kernel.

Also, please, don't try to find fixes for the 3.2 kernel: it was a quick
and dirty kernel we set up for the purpose of showing Replicant 2.3.
It is a pure waste of time and we will anyway reject that as a stable
kernel for the future.

So now, what do we do ? I can't do magic and solve the huge issues I am
facing everytime and at the very least, I need help from competent
people. I can definitely handle the Android/Replicant userspace part,
also some easy driver bits of the kernel but I need a stable,
fully-featured base. Else I can keep going with any of the kernels I
tried that offer the least minimum to develop the userspace, but it will
all be wasted time if we don't have a real kernel at some point.

I think we need to do this now or just forget about the idea of having
Android/Replicant running on GTA04. Please, help me out!

-- 
Paul Kocialkowski, Replicant developer

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