IRC log of #cubox of Tue 08 Jan 2013. All times are in CET < Back to index

08:12 ralix morning
08:19 wumpus in case anyone's interested in reverse engineering the gpu in the cubox and helping write an open source driver, there's a project for that now: https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv/wiki
10:01 rabeeh wumps: hi
10:02 rabeeh wumps: your github caught my eyes :)
10:22 wumpus rabeeh: hey
10:23 wumpus mind that I don't have a cubox myself yet (but another device with a GC800), however the chip should be mostly the same
10:54 Thirsty rabeeh: do you get better support for Marvell these days?
11:07 rabeeh wumps: mmp2?
11:08 rabeeh Thirsty: I get support
11:08 rabeeh Thirsty: r u referring to the court thing?
11:08 wumpus just the Vivante stuff (2D/3D rendering engine)
11:09 rabeeh the gc800; is it a Marvell based device? i recally mmp2 has gc800 inside
11:10 rabeeh wumpus: the vivante gpu is in lots of SoCs today; I think the freescale imx are using them too
11:11 wumpus mine has a rockchip 2918 soc
11:11 wumpus afaik it's marvell armada, rockchip 2918 and indeed the freescale i.mx6 that has vivante.. but there's probably more
11:12 rabeeh there are few more.
11:12 rabeeh what's the idea behind reverse engineering?
11:12 rabeeh the kernel driver is open source
11:13 wumpus open source userspace
11:13 rabeeh (i know)
11:13 rabeeh :)
11:13 rabeeh i meant what's the plan?
11:13 rabeeh in what stage are you on this?
11:13 wumpus well what's mainly needed is a shader compiler now
11:14 wumpus the part about how to render is mostly figured out
11:15 wumpus the most difficult thing is that there are zillion different possibilities with the feature bits, so what works on one device may not work exactly the same on another
11:15 Thirsty rabeeh: half a year ago, graphic driver was a problem and getting respons for better ones for Marvell, take a while. I don't know if it's getting better?
11:15 rabeeh Thirsty: Marvell gets the GPU support from Vivante too; that's the main bottleneck
11:16 Thirsty I finally moved to a my new home. So now I got time again to play with the cubox again
11:16 rabeeh :)
11:16 rabeeh congrats
11:16 Thirsty thanks.
11:16 rabeeh rmull: CuBox pro is changing DDR chip from 2Gb to 4Gb
11:17 rabeeh i don't know if you have rework station; but if you do then you can switch the chips
11:17 Thirsty rabeeh: what packages are the chips? BGA or TSSOP?
11:17 rabeeh BGA
11:18 rabeeh it's the standard jedec 96balls 0.8mm pitch devices
11:18 Thirsty my old company had one :(
11:18 rabeeh wumpus: are you familiar with Vivante profiling capability?
11:19 Thirsty I saw yesterday that shesselba did a lot of work to port the kernel to v3.6.
11:21 Thirsty and also getting it in to the mainline kernel
11:27 wumpus rabeeh: yes, somewhat, the chip has various performance counters per module
11:30 wumpus both low level (number of 8-byte quantities read) and higher level (number of primitives rendered)
11:33 wumpus they're read from the kernel (because userspace can only write state)
11:54 Thirsty rabeeh: are there any graphic kernel drivers v3.6 kernel?
11:59 Coburn I await the day I see Portal 3 on the CuBox
12:00 Coburn :)
12:00 bencoh :)
12:00 wumpus hehe
12:01 Coburn Also, was there any intention to port android on the CuBox?
12:01 Coburn I know 2.2 was ported, but that's OLD
12:02 Coburn 4.2.x is where the flavor is at (Jelly Bean)
12:02 Coburn Reason I ask is that there's a console called OUYA that has a Tegra quadcore in it running Android
12:02 Coburn and it's designed like a PS3/Xbox/etc
12:03 Coburn The console is in the works, but it's got a lot of big-names backing it
12:03 Coburn Just thought I'd bring that onto the battlefield, because it would be a CuBox rival when it comes to gaming
12:05 rmull rabeeh: I do have rework capability - the cubox pro is the only one that will be upgradeable? I have the original non-pro cubox
12:08 Coburn I thought I heard rumors that the original CuBox had 2GB DDR3 RAM, but only 1GB was accessable?
12:08 rabeeh Coburn: the board supported 4Gb devices (4Gb x 4 devices = 2GB)
12:08 Thirsty Coburn: that would be great
12:11 Coburn I don't understand what you mean by 4Gb x 4
12:11 Coburn I thought that would be 16GB?
12:11 Coburn Do you mean 4Mbits?
12:11 Coburn 4Gbits*
12:11 wumpus Gb not GB :p
12:11 Thirsty 16Gbit / 8 bit = 4GByte
12:11 Thirsty 16Gbit / 8 bit = 2GByte
12:12 Coburn Thirsty: that does not compute
12:12 Coburn you mean 32Gbit / 8 = 4Gbyte
12:12 Coburn ?
12:13 Thirsty yep, I was to fast :)
12:13 Coburn So in the original cubox case
12:13 Coburn It's a 8Gbit RAM chip?
12:13 rabeeh yes
12:13 rabeeh four devices each 2Gb
12:13 rabeeh 4x2Gb = 1GB :)
12:13 Coburn Ohhhhhhhh
12:14 rabeeh now on the pro-
12:14 rabeeh 4x4Gb = 2GB
12:14 Coburn Now it clears up.
12:14 Thirsty rabeeh: now you want to make a 4gbyte version?
12:14 Coburn Damn Gbit terms, can't they just use plain english?
12:15 Coburn I'd upgrade the CPU before hitting 4Gytes
12:15 Coburn of RAM
12:15 Coburn I mean, wouldn't it be a little wasteful having a single core running with 4GB of RAM?
12:15 Coburn Also, rabeeh, what does dual issue mean? Two instructions being fired at once?
12:16 rabeeh 4GB is a waste on any 32bit architecture
12:16 Thirsty I think a lot of server application a lot of memory is usefull.
12:16 rabeeh dual issue mean two instructions at once (if they don't conflict from resource point of view)
12:17 rabeeh but this would be ARMv8 (which is 64bit)
12:17 rabeeh in general more memory can be used on ARM once using LPAE
12:17 Coburn 64bit ARM? Count me in
12:17 rabeeh Coburn: still no devices available on this; it's a pretty new architecture
12:18 rabeeh LPAE in ARM is 40bit physical addressability
12:18 wumpus also I wonder if the focus on 64 bit and high performance will start to cancel out the power advantage ARM has compared to Intel
12:18 rabeeh wumpus: it doesn't
12:18 rabeeh it's a RISC vs. CISC battle
12:18 wumpus cool
12:18 Coburn Intel Atoms compared with ARM are dead in the water
12:19 Coburn I mean, the Atom gets shat on by ARM
12:19 rabee 12:19 * rabeeh agrees
12:19 Coburn I had a board that had a dualcore with HyperThreading Atom 330
12:19 Coburn When it did USB I/O or connect a SSD to it
12:19 Coburn it bogged down
12:20 Coburn any major I/O = lag
12:20 rabeeh USB 2.0?
12:20 rabeeh or USB 3.0?
12:20 Coburn yeah.
12:20 Thirsty I am not so sure about it. I reed a artical about it. Atom Z2760 vs Tegra 3. Dutch: http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/3740/intel-atom-z2760-vs-nvidia-tegra-3-review-hoe-presteert-windows-8-op-x86-en-arm
12:21 Coburn Intel is a sitting duck.
12:21 rabeeh Coburn: lots of people thought the same :)
12:21 rabeeh i think there will be a fight; no one will know the results yet.
12:21 Coburn I have a ODROID-U2, which is a quadcore Exynos 1.7Ghz PC (same spec as the Galaxy note 2) and it's a ARMv7
12:21 Coburn It flies
12:21 Coburn Runs Ubuntu 12.10 quickly
12:22 Thirsty I also was looking a that one.
12:22 Coburn Be warned
12:22 Thirsty Too bad, i didn't had 1gbit lan
12:22 Coburn the base unit doesn't come with AC adapter
12:22 Coburn that's $20 extra
12:22 rabeeh it's pretty nakes
12:22 rabeeh it's pretty naked
12:22 Coburn and debug board is $15 extra
12:22 rabeeh i saw you were using the heatsink with it?
12:23 Coburn you saw my youtube video?
12:23 rabeeh yes
12:23 Coburn Yeah, it comes with heat sink
12:23 rabeeh Aluminum heatsink?
12:23 Coburn something like that
12:23 rabeeh is it hot? bearable?
12:23 rabeeh cold?
12:23 Coburn that acts like a stand, and yes, I compiled a kernel on it and it was just warmer than my skin
12:23 rabeeh i mean after working for 1hr doing heavy stuff
12:23 rabeeh that's ok
12:23 Coburn Haven't tested that, but does compiling a kernel count?
12:24 rabeeh make -j4?
12:24 Coburn Seemed to leave one core idle though
12:24 Coburn just sudo make
12:24 Coburn forgot that param
12:24 rabeeh files from SD? SATA?
12:24 Coburn eMMC and uSD onboard
12:24 rabeeh i typically use 'sar'
12:24 rabeeh oh; those are really slow
12:25 Coburn No SATA I don't think...
12:25 Coburn Uh
12:25 rabeeh probably your processors are waiting for I/O to finish
12:25 Coburn well actually
12:25 Coburn sorr
12:25 Coburn y
12:25 Coburn USB SSD
12:25 Coburn in a SATA2 caddy
12:25 rabeeh run 'make -j4' and in parallel run 'sar -du 5 1'
12:25 Coburn what's sar do?
12:25 rabeeh gives stats on lots of things
12:25 Coburn okay, noted
12:26 rabeeh http://linux.die.net/man/1/sar
12:26 rabeeh sar -du 5 1 will collect cpu utilization for 5 seconds and report
12:26 Coburn They say it uses uBoot to start up
12:26 Coburn but I cannot see where the uImage is
12:26 Coburn just zImage
12:26 Coburn so I think it's Samsung bootloader only
12:26 Coburn Supervivi or something like that
12:26 rabeeh i hate those custom boot loaders
12:27 Coburn Well, it's handy
12:27 Coburn just replace the zImage and off you go
12:27 Coburn however, I could be wrong; I don't have debug board so I can't tell you if it is uBoot
12:27 Coburn Gotta order one
12:28 Coburn can uBoot boot zImages?
12:28 Coburn Or only uImage?
12:30 Cobur 12:30 * Coburn pokes rabeeh
12:30 Coburn Looks like I killed the channel.
12:31 bencoh yeah, you silly killer.
12:32 Coburn However, one thing the ODROID-U2 lacks is the support base
12:32 Coburn the support forums are horrible
12:33 Coburn phpBB2 and the people there are questionabl
12:33 Coburn e*
12:33 Coburn like they don't read the FAQs, don't use search, etc.
12:34 Coburn Not bashing them, but it's patchy
12:40 rabeeh here
12:40 rabeeh u-boot can boot zImage
12:41 rabeeh Coburn: where can i get more information on the lcd register issue thing?
12:42 rabeeh have a pointer? or something?
12:42 Coburn [21:40:47] < rabeeh> u-boot can boot zImage <- Aha! So that's what happens then!
12:42 Coburn rabeeh: your best info would be _rmk_, but he was sent to exile, no?
12:43 rabeeh yea
12:43 rabeeh i don't know what happened there
12:44 Coburn I think he just got pissed off to the extent that he didn't want to talk to you anymore
12:44 Coburn Not blaming anyone
12:44 Coburn Just observation
12:44 Coburn He could have been in a ragey mood too.
12:44 Coburn bribe him back and interrogate him :P
12:45 Coburn Ok
12:45 Coburn [21:45:02] NickServ [NickServ@services.]: Last seen : Jan 03 12:00:37 2013 (4 days, 23:44:31 ago)
12:45 Coburn He's been MIA
12:56 rabeeh i sent him an email clearing things up
12:57 Coburn That's good
12:57 rabeeh well.. that was 10minutes after he left; never got anything back
12:57 Coburn :(
12:57 Coburn If I had the tools
12:58 Coburn I'd be able to give you dumps of the registers when it "derps"
12:58 Coburn derp = goes stupid
12:58 Coburn It's mostly present in GeeXbox.
12:58 rabeeh i still don't understand what the issue is
12:58 rabeeh oh; so it's on geexbox
12:58 rabeeh how do you reproduce? what do you see?
12:59 Coburn dbsx hasn't experienced it, but I have (he's got one of the first cuboxes).
12:59 Coburn From what I understand
12:59 rabeeh dbsx is our Aussie distributor :)
12:59 Coburn I boot up GeeXbox
12:59 rabeeh he has lots of CuBoxes :)
12:59 Coburn Yup
13:00 Coburn My cubox I had is at my brothers, but what he does is
13:00 Coburn Boot up CuBox -> select video -> it buffers (WORKING....) and then the screen flickers as the video resolution is set
13:00 Coburn sometimes, the screen will flicker, and the video will play back, but then the overlay with time, clock and controls will be skewered
13:01 Coburn This is Standard Definition DVD Rips. a mixture or standard and high profile.
13:01 rabeeh skewered ?
13:01 Coburn when the system is glitched and the register is malfunctioning, a diagnoal line exists
13:01 rabeeh completely corrupted?
13:02 Coburn let me get you a photo.
13:02 rabeeh oh great; photo :)
13:03 Coburn come on twitter, you're so slow
13:04 Coburn rabeeh: https://twitter.com/coburn64/status/278649358164058112/photo/1
13:04 Coburn That explains it quite well
13:04 rabeeh oh
13:04 rabeeh so the RGB pitch got corrupted
13:04 rabeeh so good; it's an LCD controller issue and not a GPU
13:04 Coburn ...pitch?
13:05 rabeeh if you look the line meats on the middle at the bottom
13:05 rabeeh i mean the diagonal line
13:05 rabeeh that means the pitch is missed in a single pixel
13:05 Coburn Ok
13:06 Coburn And with this, you can file a defect with Marvell?
13:06 rabeeh :)
13:06 rabeeh it's a driver issue that I can probably fix
13:06 rabeeh but i need to recreate
13:06 rabeeh well.. one thing
13:06 rabeeh how th resolution changes? did u set the resolution to change upon video resolution?
13:07 Coburn I don't know. The screen just flickers
13:07 rabeeh i mean if it's 720p movie; did u set it to change the gui resolution?
13:07 Coburn Could it be just XBMC warming up?
13:07 Coburn I don't think so
13:07 Coburn I can't remmeber
13:07 rabeeh what happens once you exit from the movie?
13:07 Coburn stays skewered
13:07 rabeeh does it go well back again?
13:07 rabeeh ok.
13:07 Coburn need to power cycle it
13:08 Coburn xorg reboot may fix it...
13:08 Coburn not sure. again, I need to get a cubox off dbsx since mine was sold to my brothers
13:08 rabeeh it's probably something went bad when enabling the video plane; something is messing with the graphics overlay
13:08 Coburn Can you look into it?
13:09 rabeeh yes. but first i need to reliably reproduce it
13:09 Coburn I'll let you know this
13:09 Coburn Got Windows? Try ripping a DVD and then encoding using handbrake using high profile mp4
13:09 Coburn then put that on usb hdd/stick and play back
13:09 Coburn stop the video, play it agian
13:10 Coburn do that like 20 times and see if you can get it to play around
13:10 rabeeh is this why _rmk_ was angry about?
13:11 Coburn somewhat
13:11 Coburn if i recall, you were saying "no, it can't happen" and he said "I can replicate it"
13:11 Coburn i could be wrong. don't quote me on that
13:12 Coburn but anyway. If we can get this issue fixed, it's all for the best. I'd be willing to provide register dumps and such
13:12 rabeeh Coburn: if you were able to reproduce (or anyone on the channel); there is a 'cat /proc/mv_lcd0' that dumps all registers on the LCD controller
13:12 rabeeh it would be helpful getting a dump before and after the issue happens
13:13 Coburn beautiful
13:13 Coburn I will do that ASAP
13:13 Coburn don't forget to put my name in the "bugfix credits"
13:13 Coburn ;)
13:15 rabeeh :)
13:15 Coburn luckily, I have a EXACT uSD image that my brother has of the XBMC setup
13:16 Coburn so I can deploy it and saves me the hassle of setting things back up
13:24 dbsx Coburn: order the CuBox and it can be there on Thursday (or do you need another credit?)
13:28 rabeeh Coburn: The Smurfs?
13:32 Coburn dbsx: I'm still waiting on payment from my brother.
13:32 Coburn rabeeh: yeah, I was tasked to rip DVDs that my brother's nieces watch, so that video was the first one that glitched
13:32 Coburn the next glitch happened on Shrek
13:33 jnettlet doing graphics development I have learned to treat the saved screenshots the same as a doctor or lawyer would. complete confidentiality and zero personal judgement
13:34 bencoh :)
13:35 Coburn anyway, gotta get to bed. parents bugging me to turn lights out and stuff.
13:36 jnettlet have sweet dreams of small blue blondes ;-D
13:36 Coburn oh please
13:36 Cobur 13:36 * Coburn cringes
13:36 Coburn dbsx: I'll call you tomorrow re cubox.
13:37 Coburn for now, I gotta get some shuteye, g'nite.
13:47 diget yeah! Finally the waiting has an end. My cubox just arrived this moment \o/. Looks really nice.
14:03 Thirsty I can try some files.
14:07 Thirsty I installed the geexbox-devel-20121206-r15609.cubox.tar.bz2 version on my SDcard
14:19 Thirsty I see that solid-run has a deb package repository. I also added to source.list. Which distrobution do I need? I currently running Debian Wheezy armhf.
14:20 Thirsty I get the following errors: libbmm-dev : Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15-0ubuntu8) but 2.13-37 is to be installed
14:21 Thirsty I am up-to-date with debian
14:27 Thirsty Ok, I found it. http://www.solid-run.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=691&p=5988&hilit=source.list#p5988
22:02 niteye how to tell if you have cubox v1 or v2 and whats the difference ?
22:04 neofob niteye: the v1 cubox has the serial usb port above the esata port
22:04 niteye ah okay
22:05 niteye frustrating, i dont have a micro-usb B cable heh
22:05 neofob you should, most cellphone these days use it to charge
22:06 niteye my phone is from before the age of connecting phones via USB, ill have to scrounge in my sister's room tomorrow