iMX53 or iMX51, any support?

[bmentink]

Hi There,

Is there any support in this project for the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start board? Or any other imx53/51 board.
If so, will there be any support for the GPU on this chip.

Thanks,
Bernie

[WarheadsSE]

Is this essentially the same architecture as the beagle & trimslice?

If so I foresee support, but as for the GPU, we're waiting on hardfloat drivers...

[bmentink]

Well the i.mx53 is similar to the OMAP3, but it does not have the same GPU, so it does not have to wait for hard-float drivers.

The i.mx53 it is an arm cortex-a8 device with a Freescale GPU that supports OpenGL ES 2.0, there reference ubuntu image supports the GPU as it plays 1080p videos just great ..

I was hoping that I could put Arch on it instead though ..

[kmihelich]

I believe those fall under a separate sub-architecture in the kernel than OMAP, so we'd need a different kernel (not hard). Otherwise, everything should shine with v7h repo.

[bmentink]

Great, anyone willing to create the new kernel? How will support for the imx53 GPU get done? Or is that in main line kernel.

As a start, If I have time I might look at the config options for the standard Freescale supplied kernel and merge with the OMAP one ..

[kmihelich]

I can look into it at some point. Do you have any technical specs on your i.MX53 platform? Aside from the GPU, which may or may not be there, what's important is knowing the chips used for ethernet, sound, power management, I2C, things like that.

[bmentink]

Here is what I have found so far:

Ethernet: SMSC LAN8720A
Audio Codec: Freescale SGTL5000
PMIC: DA9053
Accelerometer: MMA8450QT

Other interfaces are on the i.mx53.

Hope that helps.

[roel]

I'm awaiting my imx53. I expect it somewhere next week. Looks a really nice board.

[ILF]

after my igep 3530 died on me 2 weeks ago i ordered the imx53 and i'm blown away by the performance of this board. very snappy and when i attach sata drive to it, it really shines. i've been battling with the software almost for a week now, though. i've tried the natty linaro port and it is awesome if you plan on running a server. if you like me are planning to use it for software prototyping (Xorg,qt,gles2.0) then you reach a point where the working hwpacks suck. When it comes to gpu/vpu driver the situation is weird with linaro it should work, but for some reason it just doesnt want to use the kernel module. Iith vanila ubuntu (no linaro overlays) 11.10 image the board is far better with the linaro 2.6.38-1401 kernel, but gets all the bloatware of ubuntu.

that is why i'm very interested of arch on top of it. what is the usual procedure for putting arch on top of new hardware? do you use the linaro toolchain with the arm patches and use their kernels or you go with plain vanila kernels? or kernels from the manufacturers? i want to help, because i would definatelly preffer minimal arch and compiling qt and plasma-active on top of it, than stripping down ubuntu till i get some-kind of minimal install similar to linaro nano and then to start building that up to a something like a working env.

[kmihelich]

Arch Linux is a distribution itself, not related to Ubuntu. You can check out their site at archlinux.org for more information on their philosophies and ways of doing things. We are the ARM port of Arch Linux, and do things much in the way they do for x86. We use our own native toolchain, which is not modified from GCC. In fact, very few packages are patched which is in line with Arch's philosophy on packages.

In short, there is absolutely no Linaro here.

For boards that are officially supported by us, we use the latest kernels with a minimal set of patches. For your i.MX chips, you'll need to build your own kernel or use one built by the community here or elsewhere, as we don't have an official kernel package supporting it.

Everything else for software is pretty much available, all the stuff you would find in other distros. We have two separate repositories depending on the platform: an ARMv5te compatible repo, and an ARMv7 Cortex-A series hard-float repo. Your i.MX53, being a Cortex-A8 core, can make use of the latter repository. You can use the latest omap-smp rootfs tarball as a starting point, just add a kernel.

If this platform has some popularity here, I'd definitely consider building a kernel for the devices and building a rootfs to jump off from. I'd need input from those that have the board though, since we don't have them to actually develop on.