OpenEmbedded BSP layer for SolidRun's CuBox

This layer provides UNOFFICIAL support for SolidRun's CuBox platform for use with OpenEmbedded and/or Yocto. See the CuBox homepage for details about this platform.

Dependencies

• URI: git://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core
• branch: master
• revision: HEAD

Building the meta-cubox layer

To build a BSP for the CuBox, first set up your OE-core distribution, then add to bblayers.conf the path to your local copy of meta-cubox.

Then, add to local.conf:

MACHINE = "cubox"

This layer adds two values to the list of available tunes:

• marvellpj4
• marvellpj4hf (marvellpj4 with hardfp mode)

These add compiler flags for Marvell's PJ4 processor, and are based on the armv7a tunes. To explicitely set one of these, add it to the local.conf file. Here is an example of a line in local.conf for hardfp builds:

DEFAULTTUNE_cubox = "marvellpj4hf"

For the rest, follow the building guidelines of the distro of your choice.

Demo images

Two demo images are included:

• cubox-demo-image-x11 : minimal image with X11 and a fullscreen matchbox-terminal
• cubox-demo-image-sato : image with the sato desktop

Both images include EGL/OpenGLES/OpenVG binaries, the hardware-accelerated video codecs, all of the GStreamer plugins from -base-meta, -good-meta, -bad-meta, and the GStreamer plugins for the Marvell codecs and enhanced XVideo image sink. In addition, they also contain plugins from -ugly-meta, gst-ffmpeg, gst-fluendo-mp3, and gst-fluendo-mpegdemux, if commercial was added to the LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST variable. The easiest way how to do that is to add this line to local.conf:

LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST += "commercial"

Layer structure

This section describes various places of interest in this layer. It contains additional information, and does not have to be read for just using meta-cubox. For anyone who wants to customize this layer, or just understand some details about it and the CuBox, this section is of interest.

Various recipes pull sources and binaries from a big package, cubox-packages.tar.gz. For sake of clarity, it is just referred to as "cubox-packages tarball" in the following subsections.

The boot.scr

The CuBox comes with an already flashed U-Boot that tries to find a boot.scr . It first tries to find it on various types of media (USB stick, SD card, storage device connected over Serial ATA ..), then tries to find it over the network. To facilitate deployment on media, the demo image recipes first produce a boot.scr out of a boot.script file that is located in config/boot/ , and copies this boot.scr into the image, into the boot/ directory. It also copies the kernel uImage into this same directory. As a result, all that needs to be done is to unpack the generated rootfs tarball on the used media (for example, an SD card), and the CuBox should boot with it.

The kernel

Currently, rabeeh's 3.6.9 fork is used. Eventually, CuBox support might be mainlined. Until then, this fork works just fine. The included cubox_defconfig is used for kernel configuration.

EGL / OpenGLES / OpenVG

Support for EGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenVG is provided by the Vivante binaries supplied by Marvell. Unfortunately, there are multiple variants of these, which can cause a lot of confusion.

The zipped binaries can be found on the solid-run website. The -light variants are used for the binaries. C headers for EGL etc. are retrieved from this zip archive. These are the newest headers and binaries. Other ones are either outdated or broken.

Also, since the kernel already links in the GALcore component, the galcore.ko kernel module from these packages is not used or installed.

Hardware-accelerated video decoding using Marvell's vMeta engine

vMeta is supported in this layer. It is split into an open-source library (libvmeta) and closed-source libraries (libmiscgen, the HAL, and the codecs). libvmeta is extracted from the cubox-packages tarball.

In softfp builds, the closed-source libraries are extracted from the marvell-ipp tarball contained within the cubox-packages one. In hardfp builds, closed-source libraries are extracted from vmeta-hardfp.tar.xz and from libmiscgen-hardfp.tar.xz.

There are two groups of provided closed-source codecs:

• vMeta decoder: hardware-accelerated video decoding, supporting h.264, WMV, MPEG2, MPEG4, and more
• IPP codecs: implemented purely in software, these codecs make use of the Marvell PJ4's iWMMXt instruction set. No hardfp variants of these codecs have been made available yet. There are IPP for both audio (AAC, AMR, MP3 etc.) and video bitstreams (h.264, WMV, MPEG2, MPEG2, etc.).

X.org Dovefb driver

This driver enables X11 support for the Dove platform. Since its initial release, Jon Nettleton has added numerous improvements. This improved driver can be found on the dev.laptop.org git site and is used in this layer. Currently, EXA is disabled by default in the xorg.conf due to instabilities. XVideo has been successfully tested.

GStreamer plugins

GStreamer plugins for both the vMeta/IPP codecs and the BMM enhanced xvimagesink are supported. The IPP codec plugins are built only if softfp is used. The bmmxvimagesink (BMM = Buffer Management Module) is built regardless of what ABI is used.