December2007

December 2007 Team Reports

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Mobile and Embedded Team

Status report for week 2007-11-15 to 2007-11-21

Hildon Desktop/ Moblin

  • Worked on a new moblin-image-creator (MIC) for hardy
    • - Prepared a new MIC from tip - Many fixes to breakages introduced by new MIC; it's quite unstable upstream - Changed the default MIC config to pull from hardy + ubuntu-mobile's hardy ppa - Got an accont on moblin.org and worked with upstream to merge my fixes
  • Worked on the new hardy based images
    • - Compile and report all regressions from gutsy to hardy - Diagnosed these regressions in depth; most time consuming were the "Xorg not starting" and the touchscreen issues; it seems the former has been fixed in Debian and probably in
      • Ubuntu as well as this time (but didn't have a chance to check), and the later will require an important time investment to port to the new xserver/xinput which has regressions for input drivers...
  • Bug triaged most ubuntu-mobile bugs
  • Finalized / reviewed some specs; should finish last specs
  • Meetings, discussions etc.

Status report for week 2007-11-21 to 2007-11-27

Hildon Desktop/Moblin

  • Participated in misc discussions on l10n
  • Worked with IS on misc lpia or ppa issues (buildd down, not enough space on some arches' ppas for kernel builds), build logs not being removed etc.
  • Comprehensive review of all issues Bob Spencer pushed through me directly; only issues where the ball is in UME's camp are l10n stuff (langpacks, default translations of some apps in
    • the interim etc.)
  • Tagged "ume-hardy-regressions" the bugs I discovered as being critical to switch to hardy
  • Discussions on PAM / keyring integration
  • Looked/followed up some xorg bugs affecting us
  • Continued merging with new upstream changes in MIC and rebasing my MIC work on new git trees; code exchange with upstream MIC is not ideal ATM; proposed misc changes to the
    • current processes to smooth these out

Moblin Kernel & Driver Status

  • PSB C0 HW Support We finally received C0 HW. Jacob is currently root causing the Local APIC Timer issue that requires the kernel boot param nolapic_timer to avoid a boot hang issue. Need to confirm that the Ubuntu kernel available in the PPA[1] boots and works correctly on the C0.

    [1] https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mobile/+archive

  • SDIO No changes to the SDIO patches since last status report. We're in the process of integrating Marvell's GPL release of the 8688 WLAN + BT drivers. We're doing the initial port of their drivers from 2.6.18 kernel and cardbus to 2.6.22 and Pierre's SDIO stack, but we will not support this port. We're expecting Ubuntu to help out here. We (Ubuntu) would require access to the HW in order to support and help with this port.
  • Dabney Thermal patches As reported previously, the Alpha release of the Dabney Thermal patches have been applied to the Moblin kernel. No changes this week. (This has already been integrated into the Ubuntu PPA.)
  • USB Client Drivers We've updated the kernel patch containing the USB Client C0 release. The update contains a fix for a bug where the USB Client crashes with a FIFO_ERROR under large bulk transfers. The released moblin's kernel-mid 2.6.22-18 release to gaston contains these changes. A pointer to the commit ID would help pull this into Ubuntu

  • PSB Gfx & Video Drivers No code changes this week. We will begin integrating PSB Gfx driver Beta3 release at the end of this week. We should have this completed by end of next week. The closed source components will not be released on moblin.org due to third-party license restrictions. A pointer to the commit ID would help pull this into Ubuntu I wasn't able to get the PSB Gfx driver team to move to using the drm.ko module from the 2.6.24 kernel. Instead Ubuntu has agreed, with reservations, to try to use Intel's Gfx driver as it stands now in Hardy. This includes the existing xorg tip version of drm.ko.

  • Power and Performance Testing/Optimization No changes this week.

Moblin Image Creator status

  • Merged in improvements from Loic Minier.
  • Continued work on adding Yum support to Moblin Image Creator

Moblin Applets Update

  • Date&Time:

    • No changes for Beta2
    • Beta3 changes are:
    • remove password prompt

    • Remove Date&Time change from drop-down calendar

    • Timezone = finger scrollable list
    • Time = popup dialog to set time
    • remove configuration fields
    • Remove: Help btn, Synchronize Now Keybindings:
    • renamed to "buttons"
    • will use moko finger scroller
    • better organization for the shortcuts
    • will support: Home, Web Browser, Photos, Videos, Music, Chat, Email, Calculator, screen brightness up, down, and minmax Toggle, and volume up, down, and mute.
    Keyboard properties:
    • renamed to "Keyboard"
    • all tabes removed except virtual keyboard settings tab
    • will focus entirely on the virtual keyboard
    • will use moko finger scroller to select layouts
    Screen Resolution:
    • removed for beta2
    Font:
    • removed for beta2
    Network Configuration:
    • removed for beta2
    System Monitor:
    • renamed to "About Device"
    • will have only one tab, showing the hardware characteristics
    Sound Mixer:
    • renamed to "volume"
    • will have 3 tabs: speakers, headphones, and microphone
    • each tab will have two sliders for left and right with a sync button
    • each tab will have a mute
    Touchscreen:
    • should no longer need root access
    • should have better looking UI
    • will have a prompt for X restart and restart X
    • will have cross-platform xorg file support
    Network Proxy:
    • renamed to "Proxy"
    • will have better scroll buttons for the port numbers.
    About Me:
    • will have one tab for purely personal info, name, address, and phone
    Background:
    • will have a moko finger scroller for selecting the pictures
    • will be organized better for 1024x600 resolution
    Battery Indicator:
    • will will have a battery level indicator in the status bar

Midbrowser Status

  • Continued with bug fixes effort. Looking into a browser crashed in accepting certificate dialog. It crashed in libsapwood.so.
  • Met with Bob and Rusty yesterday and discussed browser UI improvements that we can make to make it more user friendly.
  • Jimmy still in the process of debugging Midbrowser with the FF 3.0 codebase.

Status report for week 2007-11-27 to 2007-12-05

Hildon Desktop

  • Proposed and discussed git-dch to help with merges at moblin
    • Reviewed Bob Spencer's Apps Criteria
    • Lots of work on tinymail + modest + wpeditor (and useless libwpeditor-plus):
      • - Revisited the initial porting done by asac (notably added configure flags for the various mozilla pkgconfig files) with the invaluable help of asac - Ported this to tinymail's SVN and sent the fixes; almost all merged - Looked into modest build failures up to where StevenK had arrived; turns out the blocker at this point was fixed in SVN - Fixed misc stuff in modest SVN (missing files, stricter compiler etc.); everything merged - Ported modest's gtkmozembed to xul 1.9 as well; and another cheers for Alexander! Almost all merged upstream - Discussed with asac how to fix the mozilla .pc files to have a clean solution for the rest of our kludges in tinymail and modest - Looked at libwpeditor-plus, turns out this isn't used anymore - Looked at wpeditor; sent misc mixes upstream and asked about public SCM; no news yet
  • Fixed serious but trivial issue in osso-af-settings which went unnoticed; sent the fixes upstream I am still pursuing work on modest and got something to play with today with a gtkhtml (instead of mozembed which upstream claims is experimental) based modest from SVN against tinymail from SVN as well.

    modest.png

Mobile Kernel and Driver Status

  • PSB / SLT HW Support Jacob is still root causing the Local APIC Timer issue, this is looking like a potential Si issue with the mwait instruction while in C1 state with Tickless idle enabled. Wakeup events are being ignored. Jacob is working on a workaround for the issue. SDIO

    We're still in the process of integrating & developer testing Marvell's GPL release of the 8688 WLAN + BT drivers. WLAN basic functionality is there, but BT is failing on FTP transfers. Dabney Thermal patches No changes this week. USB Client Drivers Alek Du is working on a full USB Client solution for Moblin.org. Specifically he's working on these tasks:

    • moblin-image-creator will be modified to allow configuring a per-platform vfat partition. Eventually mic will support per-device type configuration, but for now we are just working with
      • per-platform. TODO: determine if per-device configs need to be done in the Moblin Beta3 timeframe.
    • Alek will add a hotplug script to crown-beach-config that will:
      • - Broadcast a DBus message to notify applications - Attempt to unmount the vfat partition, and if that fails then wait a configurable period of time, kill all processes with open file descriptors on the partition, and then unmount the
        • partion
        - After the device is disconnected, then mount the vfat partition and then broadcast a DBus message to let applications know that it is Ok to read data off the partition again.
        • This first implementation will not provide a mechanism for the user to cancel the sync operation via the device. That will happen by using the host system to disconnect (or just pulling out the USB cable.) Eventually (and we need to decide if this is a Beta3 thing), we need to have an interactive interface between the applications and the hotplug script to allow an app to prevent a sync. For example, you plug your device into the host system, but only want to charge and wish to continue using the MID.

    PSB Gfx & Video Drivers We've begun integrating PSB Gfx driver Beta3 release. I'm expecting it to be completed by end of this week. During our integration testing we noticed that with this version of the driver, Power Top is showing an additional 120 interrupts per second from X. The closed source components will not be released on moblin.org due to third-party license restrictions. Power and Performance Testing/Optimization No changes this week.

Midbrowser Status

  • Fixed a browser crashed in accepting certificate dialog reported early last week. The stack dump pointed to libsapwood.so but it turned out the root cause was in browser's
    • gtk2drawing.c. It passed a bad widget to one of libsapwood's drawing routine.
  • Implemented some ui changes to the preference dialog as suggested by Bob and Rusty. The goal was to simplify the preference pages in the preference dialog.
  • Jimmy finally got the Midbrowser working with the FF3.0 beta1 codebase. The basic web browsing appears to work fine. The new "page zoom" feature seems to work pretty good. He didn't
    • spend too much time on testing it. There are currently 2 known issues. The hildonized menu didn't work properly and gconf patch that we obtained from Suse didn't work at all.

Weekly status for Moblin Image Creator

  • Work continued on yum support for moblin image creator. Can now create a project and a target using Fedora.
  • Still need to create an install USB image, which works differently on Fedora versus Ubuntu
  • Prajwal (mostly) and I have made some nice changes to the GUI. Selecting which FSET to install is much slicker looking than before. Also the throbber doesn't stop when deleting large
    • projects anymore.

Status report for week 2007-12-05 to 2007-12-12

Weekly Status report for Hildon Desktop

  • Solved some new tinymail and modest build failures
  • Subscribed to tinymail and modest lists; sent patches, remarks, and questions
  • USB Client work - Email discussions with Intel folks - Documented discussions and ideas - Ad hoc meeting on the subject; followup meeting to come
  • Helped misc people do misc packaging / Launchpad / Ubuntu stuff (uploads, ppa, investigate missing builds or installability issue etc.)

Moblin Kernel and Driver Status

  • 2.6.24 Kernel Support

    Alek cloned a new kernel repository for holding the 2.6.24 kernel on moblin.org at http://www.moblin.org/repos/develop/linux-2.6.24.git. We're still in our planning for supporting the 2.6.24 kernel, but Alek has started the effort to port our patches to the 2.6.24 kernel. PSB / SLT HW Support Jacob has found that the Local APIC Timer issue is caused by a broken MWAIT instruction in the processor that reveals itself when running tickless idle and entering a C1 state. Jacob is experimenting with a patch to work around the issue. The proper way to handle this issue is to mark the MWAIT instruction as broken to the kernel by taking out the CPU_FEATURE_MWAIT after cpuid is read for the effected processor. This will cause the kernel to use the HALT instruction for the C1 state, but has the more costly side effect for C2 and higher states of replacing MWAIT with an I/O port call and subsequent SM Interrupt and SMI handler in BIOS. SDIO

    Feng completed integrating & porting Marvell's GPL release of the 8688 WLAN + BT drivers to Moblin's 2.6.22 kernel + Pierre's SDIO stack. We're now working through our internal release process for legal compliance so we can release the drivers on moblin.org. Feng also fixed a bug in Pierre's SDIO stack, which is now checked in on moblin.org, that blocked S4 suspend/resume. Dabney Thermal patches No changes this week. USB Client Drivers Alek added udev_event support to the USB Client driver so that user-space can be notified when the USB Client port is connected/disconnected. In addition Alek has been committing changes to the crown-beach-config and moblin-image-creator repos for supporting the USB Client implementation that I outlined in last week's status report.

    PSB Gfx & Video Drivers Inuka completed integration of the PSB Gfx driver Beta3 release and Open Source components have been committed on moblin.org. We added a new repository libva.git on moblin.org to hold the libva package for PSB HW assisted video playback. The closed source components cannot be released on moblin.org due to third-party license restrictions. Power and Performance Testing/Optimization Jay has been experimenting on using a MID version of the Intel C Compiler with the goal to increase application runtime performance. After several weeks of working with the compiler team we received a version of the compiler that can compile the Mobile Browser and resulting output not core dump. Jay will be running performance tests on the compiler output. Inuka created some scripts that run different workloads and tracks the number of swaps to disk. This is used to gauge our memory consumption while the system is running a specific workload and whether or not we need to tune our SW stack for different memory sizes. If there's interest in these scripts, we can investigate releasing them out on moblin.org.

Midbrowser Status

  • Mostly worked on bugs that were targeted for our internal Beta 2 release.
  • Jimmy has been working closely with Alexander on trying to resolve some of the issues found during the integration of Midbrowser with Firefox 3.0 beta 1 code base. Hopefully they will resolve some of these

    issues by next week so that we can build a demo package for Pat McGowan to demo it in the up coming Cosumer Electronic Show.

Moblin Applets

  • Added Danny Varner's additions to the touchscreen applet
  • About Me Applet - Completey tore down the about-me dialog to just include a single pane with the following information:
    • Username - the nickname or username for login purposes First Name - Given Name Last Name - Family Name Home Phone Mobile Phone Address Email - the primary email account
    • These all still transmit to the evolution data server and so stil function as before, just with less of them.
  • Help Buttons - Removed all the Help buttons from the applets since there is no global help infrastructure in place.
  • Network Proxy - Changed the port entry boxes in the network proxy dialog from spinbuggon widgets to standard text entry widgets.
  • Applet Names - Renamed all the remaining applets to:
    • Keyboard - formerly Keyboard Properties Sound - formerly Sound Mixer Buttons - formerly Keybindings Proxy - formerly Network Proxy Background - formerly Backgroun Properties About Me - stayed the same
  • Mixer Applet - Fixed the Volume applet to incorporate the UDS and Bob Spencer's suggestions
    • Removed the PCM tab. The PCM volume is now set behind the scenes to 98% high so as to prevent distortion, and the user can now only control the speakers, microphone, and headphones.
    • Removed all the Volume buttons and replaced the them with just the two sliders, set apart widely for easy scrolling of left and right.
    • Removed the left and right channel mute buttons and replaced them with a single mute button per tab
  • BUGS FIXED
  • BUG: "re-launch control panel applets (Background Properties) will cause control panel exist unexpectedly."

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/155679 FIX: I tried this using the latest target image on a samsung using moblin-applets 0.20 and was able to successfully open, select, close over and over again more than 10 times without fail. I believe I fixed

      • this when I removed all the superflous background settings like "for all users or just this one" and "stretch, tiles, center, etc".
  • BUG: "change network configuration applet settings cause application launch issue"
  • BUG: "the dialog display is not correct"

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/156528 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop from the desktop. So none of the control panel menu functions exist

      • anymore - Restore original Settings, Clear user data, and Mobile Operator Setup Wizard. Since these functions don't exist, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.

  • BUG: "Cannot open Control Panel->Tools->Moblile operator setup wizard submenu"

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-ui-framework/+bug/164246 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop from the desktop. So none of the control panel menu functions exist

      • anymore - Restore original Settings, Clear user data, and Mobile Operator Setup Wizard. Since these functions don't exist, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.

  • BUG: "Control Panel->Tools->Restore original settings doesn't take effect"

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-ui-framework/+bug/164251 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop from

      • the desktop. So none of the control panel menu functions exist anymore - Restore original Settings, Clear user data, and Mobile Operator Setup Wizard. Since these functions don't exist, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.

  • BUG: "Control Panel->Tools->Clear user data doesn't take effect"

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-ui-framework/+bug/164255 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop from

      • the desktop. So none of the control panel menu functions exist anymore - Restore original Settings, Clear user data, and Mobile Operator Setup Wizard. Since these functions don't exist, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.

  • BUG: Control panel->Tools->Restore original settings/Clear user data dialog box title/contentbutton show error

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/164259 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop from the desktop. So none of the control panel menu functions exist

      • anymore - Restore original Settings, Clear user data, and Mobile Operator Setup Wizard. Since these functions don't exist, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.
  • BUG: "Settings applet "Keybindings" should be named "Buttons""

  • BUG: "Cannot open "Control Panel->Tools->Help" submenu"

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-ui-framework/+bug/164262 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop fromthe desktop. So none of the control panel menu functions exist

      • anymore - Restore original Settings, Clear user data, and Mobile Operator Setup Wizard, also the help function. Since these functions don't exist, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.
  • BUG: "hildon-control-panel can't use libosso read/write state"

    • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/145951 FIX: In the latest build, the control panel has been removed and all the control panel apps are actually called by hildon-desktop from the desktop. So no functions exported by the control panel

      • libraries, besides execute, will be called. Since these functions don't get called anymore, and they all have to do with reading and writingthe osso state, this bug is no longer reproducable and is tacitly fixed.

Status report for week 2007-12-12 to 2007-12-21

Hildon Desktop Status

  • Commented on misc ongoing discussions
  • Uploaded hildon-desktop with patch by Horace Li; should solve hildon-desktop issue reported by Mobile Business Unit (MBU) team with the Flash UI

Moblin Kernel and Driver Status

  • 2.6.24 Kernel Support Alek continues to port the patches from 2.6.22 to 2.6.24. He is using/referencing the work previously done by Amit. PSB / SLT HW Support Jacob still owes me a patch to work around the MWAIT/local APIC timer issue. We decided to go with the plan to mark the MWAIT instruction broken in the kernel taking out the CPU_FEATURE_MWAIT after cpuid is read for the effected processor. SDIO

    Feng has released a kernel patch on moblin.org containing Marvell's GPL release of the 8688 WLAN + BT drivers. In the process we've removed the older & outdated MSS SDIO kernel patch from moblin.org. Pierre Ossman's SDIO stack is the only choice for SDIO support on moblin. Dabney Thermal patches No changes this week. USB Client Drivers Alek continues to add support for the USB Client solution that was described previously. I don't have an update on his status this week.

    PSB Gfx & Video Drivers Inuka has been investigating a bug with the PSB Gfx Beta3 RC driver where powertop is reporting that X is generating 120+ interrupts/second when the system is idle. This prevents the CPU from going into a

    lower power C state and blows battery life. The issue is believed to be in the implementation/design on the interface between closed & open pieces of the driver. After the holidays we'll be talking directly with the 3rd party developer to get this corrected. Power and Performance Testing/Optimization Jay has numbers that compares performance between the mobile browser compiled with gcc and browser compiled with Intel C/C++ compiler. As expected there are some significant improvement, for example browser startup appears to be about 25% faster with the version compiled with the Intel compiler. Before we get too excited, we need spend some time scrubbing the data and make sure the numbers we've collected are accurate.

MOTU

  • NEW packages: ipod-convenience, mythtv-theme-blootube-osd, mythtv-theme-projectgrayhem, mythtv-theme-projectgrayhem-wide, mythtv-theme-projectgrayhem-osd, ike, pq, firmware-tools

  • We're pleased to announce that Harald Sitter now is a MOTU. After putting a lot of work into Kubuntu, everybody's happy to have him in the team now!

  • Till Kamppeter, our printing guru, joined the MOTU team!

  • Jamie Strandboge, who has been doing awesome work in the security and the server team now is a MOTU! Please give him a warm welcome to the team!

Full Circle Magazine

  • Issue #8 is out now, a week earlier than usual, due to the festive season.
  • #6 Italian, #6 Spanish and #7 Chinese are all up for download.
  • A trial episode of the podcast was released on Friday 14th December. Most criticism was levelled at the sound quality. The entire podcast was a recorded (then edited) conference call via Gizmo, next episode Matt will try Skype to see if that will remove any sound issues.

  • We have begun a test of using 'apt:' links. It is being trialled in the Top5 section of the magazine. If reader feedback on this is positive then we could use it throughout the magazine. URL links are in blue underline, APT links are in red underline.

  • The Chinese translation team have asked if they could change some news articles since some do not apply there (Dell shipping Ubuntu machines etc.) so the Chinese edition will feature more local news items.
  • Articles are coming in thick and fast. We have enough articles in reserve to easily fill the magazine for the next three issues.

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TeamReports/December2007 (last edited 2008-08-06 16:59:59 by localhost)