[Gta04-owner] We need an Android kernel

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Le lundi 29 juillet 2013 à 14:30 +0200, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller a
écrit :
> > I will get back to working on Android devices given that the situation
> > hasn't improved.
> 
> Well it is work and isn't improving by observing...

Yes I understand that, though I'm not very efficient when it comes to
working with the kernel, so watching and testing is nearly as much as I
can do.

> > I plan to get back to work on Android userspace for
> > gta04 as soon as there is a working Android kernel.
> > 
> > Either trying to make an Android kernel work on gta04
> 
> After the recent discussions I think it is the more troublesome approach
> to make some (old) Android kernel (with its own bugs and deficiencies)
> work on the GTA04.

I wrote the words in that order, but I don't really mean we should
prefer one approach (making gta04 work on Android kernel) over the other
one (making Android work on gta04 kernel).

Moreover, I think you convinced me that using recent kernels with
Android things enabled is the way to go.

> > or waiting for one
> > is a considerable waste of my time, so I prefer to leave that to
> > competent people and focus on what I do best, which is working on other
> > Android phones.
> > 
> > It seems to me like what happens next is up to you: either some real
> > kernel works gets and we can move on, or Android on GTA04 will stay in
> > this unusable status and people will lose interest as the hardware will
> > get older and older.
> > 
> > I think the biggest issue we have here is the DM37x platform. Things
> > would have been considerably better with an OMAP 3630, and the best
> > choice of all would have been using one of Allwinner's platform, such as
> > the A10 or the A13, which have a very active community of
> > U-Boot/Linux/Userspace developers.
> 
> Did you read my mail this morning? It looks very good with the 3.11-rc2 kernel
> and we just need to know what is not working, i.e. real bug reports [1].

Actually, I didn't read it before now. I thought, given the title of the
thread, that it was still about how to get 1Ghz working.
So this is great new! If suspend/resume works ok, that's the way to go.
I'll ask Denis to test it soon then.

> And we are really willing to solve these issues - if someone tells us what
> is not working to run Replicant on top. If there are no specific reports we
> can't fix anything...
> 
> BTW: the OMAP3630 IS the DM3730. There was never a public chip
> called OMAP3630 - this was the working title what was sold as DM3730.
> 
> Like the OMAP3430 sold to Nokia and Palm was made an OMAP3530 in
> the public.

My point is that there are no Android phones sold with DM37x, while
there are a few other OMAP3 out there, which have a proper 3.0 kernel
from TI or from the manufacturers. With that granted, adding gta04
support would have been dead easy.

The BeagleBoard-xM Android kernels all come with missing suspend/resume
support as far as I could see, or then they use the very old 2.6.37
kernel.

> And if you think there is lack of community support - it isn't. There is the
> BeagleBoard XM using *exactly the same chip* as the GTA04. So each bit
> fixed in the mainline kernel tree for the BeagleBoard XM helps the GTA04
> and vice versa. 

It seems very much like it, given that suspend/resume for DM37x seems to
get better and better at every mainline release.

So maybe there is hope :)