xf86-video-geode 2.11.18

Yesterday, I pushed out version 2.11.18 of the Geode X.Org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients. This release mostly includes maintenance fixes of all sorts. Of noticeable interest is a fix for the long-standing issue that switching between X and a VT would result in a blank screen (this should probably be cherry-picked for distributions running earlier releases of this driver). Many thanks to Connor Behan for the fix!

Unfortunately, this driver still doesn't work with GNOME. On my testing host, launching GDM produces a blank screen. 'ps' and other tools show that GDM is running but there's no screen content; the screen remains pitch black. This issue doesn't happen with other display managers e.g. LightDM. Bug reports have been filed, additional information was provided, but the issue still hasn't been resolved.

Additionally, X server flat out crashes on Geode hosts running Linux kernels 4.2 or newer. 'xkbcomp' repeatedly fails to launch and X exits with a fatal error. Bug reports have been filed, but not reacted to. However, interestingly enough, X launches fine if my testing host is booted with earliers kernels, which might suggest what the actual cause of this particular bug might be:

Since kernel 4.2 entered Debian, the base level i386 kernel on Debian is now compiled for i686 (without PAE). Until now, the base level was i586. This essentially makes it pointless to build the Geode driver with GX2 support. It also means that older GX1 hardware won't be able to run Debian either, starting with the next stable release.

xf86-video-geode: Last call, dernier sévice

I guess that the time has finally come to admit that, as far as upstream development is concerned, the Geode X.Org driver is reaching retirement age:

While there have indeed been recent contributions by a number of developers to keep it compilable against recent X releases, the Geode driver has accumulated too much cruft from the Cyrix and NSC days, and it hasn't seen any active contribution from AMD in a long time. Besides, nowadays, Xserver pretty much assumes that its runs on an X driver that leverages its matching kernel driver and thus won't require root priviledges to launch. This isn't the case with the Geode driver, since it directly probes FBDEV and MSR, both of which reside in /dev and require root priviledges to access.

On Debian, as a stopgap measure, the package now Recommends a legacy wrapper that enforces operation as root. Meanwhile, other distributions are mercilessly droping all X drivers that don't leverage KMS. Basically, unless a miracle happens really quick, Geode will soon become unusable on X.

Back when AMD was still involved, a concensus had been reached that, since the Geode series doesn't offer any sort of advanced graphic capabilities, the most sensible option would indeed be to make a KMS driver and let Xserver use its generic modeline driver on top of that, then drop the Geode X driver entirely. Amazingly enough, someone did start working on a KMS driver for Geode LX, but it never made it as far as the Linux kernel tree (additionally, Gitorious seems to be down, but I have a copy of the driver's Git tree on hand, if anyone is interested). While I'll still be accepting and merging patches to the Geode X driver, our best long-term option would be to finalize the KMS driver and have it merged into Linux ASAP.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.17

This morning, I pushed out version 2.11.17 of the Geode X.Org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients. This is a minor release. It merges conditional support for the OpenBSD MSR device (Marc Ballmer, Matthieu Herrb), fixes a condition that prevents compiling on some embedded platforms (Brian A. Lloyd) and upgrades the code for X server 1.17 compatibility (Maarten Lankhorst).

Pending issues:

• toggle COM2 into DDC probing mode during driver initialization
• reset the DAC chip when exiting X and returning to vcons
• fix a rendering corner case with Libre Office

xf86-video-geode 2.11.14

A few days ago, I pushed out version 2.11.14 of the Geode X.org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients.

This release mostly features long-overdue fixes to rendering issues under GTK3+ and xulrunner, plus yet more ongoing changes to make this driver compile under recent X servers.

Sadly, the release took place much too late to be included into the upcoming stable Debian version, Wheezy, which is already deeply into freeze, pending publication.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.13

A few days ago, I pushed out version 2.11.13 of the Geode X driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1, by a plethora of thin clients such as the ThinCan, by low-power desktops such as the Linutop and by a few notebooks such as the eCafé EC800.

While this release indeed features a few bugfixes (mainly to keep this driver compilable on the latest X server), the lion's share of the changes involve a complete overhaul of the build scripts, courtesy of Gaetan Nadon. The key motivation for this overhaul was to acknowledge the efforts made by third-party contributors to make the driver compile on BSD variants. Sure enough, this release finally compiles on FreeBSD and, low and behold, on Hurd.

However, the hybrid nature of Debian's FreeBSD kernel-based GNU operating system variant posed an additional challenge, because it provides usable support for Video for Linux version 2 (V4L2), but without the full complement of Linux definitions. This resulted in one post-release commit (included in Debian and Ubuntu package 2.11.13-2), following which my assertion that we could now safely define this package as Architecture: any-i386 finally proved to be a safe one for Debian-based operating systems.

At this point, I'm curious as to how many more operating systems, especialy BSD variants, can finally use this driver. Patches to further improve support of non-Linux systems are welcome.

X.org video driver Geode 2.11.9

Released just a few hours ago:

We are pleased to announce this maintenance release of xf86-video-geode. It features a plethora of bug fixes, a few documentation updates and one performance enhancement. This release also marks the return of Advanced Micro Devices to the development team. Please read the content of NEWS for more details.

In practice, this Geode 2.11.9 release mostly fixes the growing number of rendering issues that were exposed with each successive release of the X.org server core. Among other things, it restores the ability to correctly view video streams on Totem and other media players, it fixes icon rendering bugs that affected various desktop environments and web browsers, it removes all remaining compiler warnings and, as a byproduct of fixing one rendering issue, the speed of our driver improved dramatically.

This is one release that will definitely please users of the OLPC XO-1 and of thin client hardware running on LTSP!

Hell just froze over a.k.a. Squeeze is frozen

Just noticed about an hour ago on debian-announce: Squeeze entered into freeze tonight. Hurray! What this means in practice is that, unless a new version of something fixes a serious bug, it will not be allowed to trickle down from Sid into Squeeze on time for the actual release.

Still, I cannot help but feel sad that it happened just a few days short of upstream releasing the Geode 2.11.9 driver for X.org, because AMD recently committed a lot of resources towards fixing all outstanding issues on this driver and yet one major Linux distribution is about to release without those fixes, unless the Release Manager agrees to let us squeeze 2.11.9 into, well, Squeeze. Doable? Possibly, if enough people calmly ask the Release Manager for it.

xf86-video-geode: new contributors shake off the dust

A couple of years ago, the Geode X.org driver lost its main contributor, due to random attrition at AMD after the company experienced severe losses at the end of a quarter. Since then, yours truly and a few random contributors have been trying to keep this driver at least remotely usable, with mixed results.

Over the past few weeks, the driver has seen new contributions, thanks to the addition of two engineers from AMD Taiwan who have been going through the list of outstanding bugs and learning the ropes of collaborating with the Free Software community. This, in turn, had a snowball effect and motivated old contributors from the OLPC project and from the thin client community to return to the driver. Hurray!

Let's give a warm welcome to Frank Huang and Hunk Cui from AMD and, if you notice any issue with the driver that is not already reported, please file a report to help us become aware it.

Cheers!

Help Wanted: testers for the Geode X.org driver on GX2 "Red Cloud"

A number of small fixes have been committed to the upstream X.org GIT to improve support for the "Red Cloud" Geode variant (called GX2 for late NSC chips and GX for newer rebranded AMD chips) and we desperately need volunteers to test those changes, before we release a new upstream tarball. If you have some Red Cloud hardware on hand and at least basic knowledge of how to compile software on Linux distributions, please contact me to the e-mail address listed in the ChangeLog. Thanks!

PS: if you're on Ubuntu, test packages are available for Lucid via my PPA.

CUPS-PDF: how my first Debian package briefly became a key component of the Ubuntu desktop strategy

Back in 2003, I packaged my very first piece of software for Debian: CUPS-PDF. The observation came to a German physics researcher, Volker C. Behr, that he constantly needed to generate PDF documents as a daily part of his workflow and that he would rather do this via desktop application's Print menu, so he coded a simple CUPS printer driver that spits out PDF documents instead of paper sheets.

This packaging gig has been one of the best cases of upstream collaboration I've been involved with, simply because Volker himself subscribes to the BTS for CUPS-PDF at various Linux distributions and because he is very proactive at responding to bug reports that concern the upstream code and the philosophy behind its implementation.

Simultaneously, there's been plenty of collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu on this package. For starters, maintaining a CUPS driver meant that I should maintain close collaboration with the CUPS maintainer. Back in 2003, this meant getting to know Kenshi Muto, first on IRC and then in person at Debconf5.

At the same event in 2005, many people had their first real experience of Ubuntu, when Mark Shuttleworth made his first keynote appearance at a Debian event. This later lead me to becoming familiar with the work of Martin Pitt and Till Kamppeter on the Ubuntu version of CUPS and CUPS-PDF packages, because Ubuntu had decided on delivering PDF generation as a standard feature of its desktop and CUPS-PDF was considered as the key solution towards implementing this. However, CUPS-PDF being a mere printer driver, it did not fit well with the GUI-oriented paradigm of the desktop, so pre-configuring the package with sensible default settings only partially worked. This issue was recently solved when GTK2 and QT (the core libraries behind GNOME and KDE applications) were upgraded to include printer management and PDF generation by standard, which resulted in the Ubuntu build of CUPS-PDF being relegated to the Universe repository.

Amusingly, the most interesting part of my collaboration with Martin and Till wasn't how it slowly helped me improve the packaging of CUPS-PDF on Debian, as much as that it introduced me to the wonders of Launchpad (tracking other distributions' bugs on the same package, Personal Package Archive, etc.) and it eventually convinced me to switch to Ubuntu for everything except my old ThinkPad, which I retained as a genuine Debian environment for development purposes.

While CUPS-PDF has mostly been superseded by GTK2 and QT's new printing features on the desktop, it definitely remains a key element of an educational or enterprise network, especially in a situation where desktop computers are in fact thin clients connecting to an LTSP server and where PDF generation is a part of the standard daily workflow.

Speaking of which, I'm currently looking for investors to launch a business venture that leverages and expands upon the ideas I've developed at Linutop and Artec. Please contact me via e-mail if you're interested in financing this venture or if you know someone who would be.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.3

A few days ago, we released version 2.11.3 of the Geode X.org driver. As you'll notice from the version number, this is only a maintenance release, mainly to fix crasher bugs that appeared since X.org server core 1.6 was released.

Meanwhile, Otavio Salvador has been busy cleaning up our GX2 support and, in the process, he also found a few interesting regressions that affect LX support as well.

Unfortunately, our goal to integrate GX1 support into our unified Geode driver still hasn't been reached, due to a lack of resources: most people who knew anything about GX1 and SC Geodes and who had access to development hardware have moved on. As such, help to complete this goal is extremely welcome.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.0: last call!

With yesterday's release of version 2.11.0 of the X.org driver for the Geode GX2/LX, a whole cycle was wrapped up for many of the developers involved:

• Jordan Crouse was among the unlucky ones who recently lost their job at AMD. The same layoff also affected Coreboot developer Marc Jones and other Geode specialists (see Jordan's blog article for details).
• Several members of the OLPC project are also moving on, now that most Linux kernel and X.org patches have been merged upstream.
• People like myself who were working in the thin client industry on Geode-based products are also moving on.

As such, remaining bugs and our milestone goal to merge back support for older GX1 Geodes might never be taken care of. From this perspective, we welcome active participation of new developers with access to a wide variety of Geode hardware to contribute and, eventually, take over upstream maintenance of xf86-video-geode.

Available for a new job

A couple of years ago, I started what has probably been the best job I've held so far, as a Business Development Manager for Artec Group where I focused on marketing and selling the ThinCan LTSP client.

During that time, I used a combination of Guerrilla Marketing techniques to spread the word about this cool Estonian embedded platform in its LTSP client configuration and defined an extremely tight market-oriented focus that saw this relatively obscure electronic design start-up rise to the forefront of the LTSP hardware market and also brought the company commendable notoriety in the Coreboot community, thanks to its Programmable LPC Dongle, a low-cost ROM emulator that can be used to bootstrap various embedded hardware and test firmware images.

Looking back at close to 3 years with Artec (if we include the stint I did at Linutop), I most fondly remember how I managed to bring the Estonian and Turkish nations closer together in collaborating on Innovation. On my first visit to Turkey, I had noticed that very little is know about Estonia in Turkey, even though both countries have a collaboration that dates back to the 1920's, so my tactic was to introduce Estonia's achievements as a whole, to establish confidence in Artec's offering. It worked:

Among other things, my idea to organize an Estonian ICT Conference during the visit of Estonian PM Andrus Ansip in Turkey created a lot of extremely positive buzz that resulted in Estonia being mentioned as a trendy country in a prime time Turkish TV series. During this time, I've also made a lot of contacts among the Estonian and Turkish business communities and, more surprisingly, among the Estonian diplomacy who, much to my amazement, welcomed my ideas for better promoting Estonian interests abroad with great enthusiasm.

Come December 2008, my time at Artec will become a page in my employment history. While the Thincan remains one of Artec's key products, current marketing and sales resources are focused on new markets and new technologies that completely fall outside my core expertise, which is why the company decided to let me go.

I thus welcome offers from interested parties in Coreboot or LTSP markets. Other refreshing offers from outside the box - such as in business diplomacy - are equally welcome, as I've been pondering a career change for a long time.

Ah, the wonders of e-commerce!

After excruciatingly long months of waiting for all pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, I am pleased to announce that the dayjob finally rolled out its very first online shop!

The process of putting this together has been quite an experience: I had to learn about the wonders of payment authorization gateways, different taxation jurisdictions, etc. For instance, we have to deal with 4 taxation jurisdictions:

1. Estonian corporates and individuals: always add 18% VAT.
2. Other EU individuals: always add 18% VAT.
3. Other EU corporates: can be exempted from VAT, if their EU tax registration number is valid. Otherwise, add 18% VAT.
4. Corporates and individuals from outside EU: always exempted from VAT.

As much as we looked around, we could not find any e-commerce site engine that can handle all the intricacies of dealing with EU corporate customers who may or may not have a valid EU taxation exemption number so, for now, our online shop only handles cases 1, 2 and 4 properly.

What can you find on our online shop?

• Our acclaimed LTSP client hardware solution, the ThinCan.
• Our really cool Programmable LPC Dongle, which is an Open Source tool for developing and debugging firmware running on devices attached to an LPC bus. I mentioned Open Source, because we publish the FPGA code and Python scripts needed to access the LPC Dongle under the LGPL.
• Various other products which we happen to sell in the Baltic market.

Anyhow, I'm really happy to finally see this online shop deployed. So many people had wanted to purchase a ThinCan using a credit card or from countries for which shipping costs were difficult to determine and we unfortunately could not easily accommodate them. This is now resolved. Enjoy!

HOWTO build a clean LTSP boot image that includes the latest updates

Thanks to Oliver Grawert and Michael Haas for this idea!

1. Check your LTSP server's sources.list

   Ensure that the server has the relevant APT sources to fetch the latest updates:

   deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main
   #deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main

   In this example, the Finnish Ubuntu mirror for the Hardy suite is used. Change this as necessary. Notice that all source package lines are purposely commented out.

2. Build a boot image using that sources.list

   Build the image using the following command:

   ltsp-build-client --copy-sourceslist --accept-unsigned-packages

   This builds the image using the repositories found in the server's sources.list. Accepting unsigned packages is necessary, because the PPA is not digitally signed.

The above method is a good way to check what would happen on a clean install, if any particular package were updated to a newer proposed release that is currently sitting on someone's PPA.

Enjoy!

HOWTO make Geode thin clients work on Ubuntu/Hardy LTSP

As summarized by Ace Suares, to validate my first rough upgrading instructions:

1. Upgrade the packages in the LTSP chroot

   First become root:

   sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386

   Then add the repository, update and upgrade:

   echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

   apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean

   APT will inform you that some packages cannot be authenticated. This is normal, since the PPA is not digitally signed. Simply answer Yes.

2. Purge the transitional AMD driver

   apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-amd

   Then, exit the chroot:

   exit

3. Update the LTSP boot image

   sudo ltsp-update-image

   On a 64-bit server, the correct command is:

   sudo ltsp-update-image --arch=i386

4. Profit?

Happy Midsummer, everyone!

ThinCan + LinuxBIOS = cool LTSP hardware

At the dayjob, we're currently clearing our warehouse of previous hardware to make room for upcoming new models, so here's a shameless plug for those who want cool Linux hardware at a discount:

ThinCan DBE60

Hardware: AMD Geode SC2200, 64MB RAM, 32MB DiskOnChip Flash, 3x USB 1.1 ports, 1/8" audio out, Centronics port, VGA port, 10/100baseT network port.

Firmware: Etherboot or WinCE 4.1 RDP client.

Price: 50 EUR/each - less shipping costs - Minimum order: 10 pieces.

PS: we also have about 50 pieces of DBE60 motherboards (without case) that can be used as embedded controllers. People with good soldering skills can add a CompactFlash socket to the unpopulated pads, as desired.

ThinCan DBE61C

Hardware: AMD Geode LX700 with CS5536 companion chip, 256MB RAM, 4x USB 2.0 ports, 1/8" audio in and out, VGA port, 10/100baseT network port.

Firmware: Etherboot on LinuxBIOS. Supported natively since Ubuntu/Gutsy.

Price: 150 EUR/each - less shipping costs - Minimum order: 2 pieces.

Interested parties can contact us via the request form.

Re: xf86-video-amd: patched xserver-xorg-core available

I previously wrote that:

The next step is to produce patches against the X server 1.4 in Debian/Sid and Ubuntu/Hardy, and then get the fix merged into the upstream X.org tree before X server 1.5 is released.

Good news: Bryce Harrington produced patched X server 1.4 packages for Ubuntu/Hardy!

The LTSP and OLPC communities are hereby invited to test this ASAP. If nothing major is reported, this will be become the standard X server 1.4 for the Ubuntu/Hardy LTS release, following which the patch will also be merged into Debian/Sid.

xf86-video-amd: patched xserver-xorg-core available

Great news: After several weeks of investigating, Bart finally figured out what made the driver for the AMD Geode GX/LX chipset fail on recent X.org servers: it turns out that, starting with X server 1.3, changes under the hood took place that affect a number of products booting off a General Software BIOS, making the whole hardware freeze as soon as a DDC probe is attempted. Bart promptly produced two patches against the x86emu component of X server 1.3 that fix the issue. Hurray!

Ubuntu/Gutsy packages of the patched X server 1.3, plus current AMD 2.7.7.5 drivers, are available in my PPA.

For Debian/Lenny, the same packages compile from Ubuntu sources as-is. Meanwhile, those of you running Debian/Etch only need to compile the Ubuntu sources for the above AMD driver against the X server 1.1 available in Etch.

This should finally allow people developing distributions for LTSP or for the OLPC to use standard Debian packages.

The next step is to produce patches against the X server 1.4 in Debian/Sid and Ubuntu/Hardy, and then get the fix merged into the upstream X.org tree before X server 1.5 is released. We're already working on it, but help is always welcome.

xf86-video-amd from OLPC not for public consumption

Holger reported in his blog that he uploaded a backport of the AMD Geode GX/LX X.org module to Debian. He also points out that what he has backported is from a non-Debian source. In case it wasn't obvious to him, there are good reasons why the official Debian module is not from the OLPC branch: the OLPC branch includes OLPC-only code that breaks operation for non-OLPC hardware. This means that the backport package is completely useless for the vast majority of GX/LX hardware on the market. Well done, Holger!