CuBox

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 07:59:05PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> These toys look fun to me.  And the prices aren't horrible.
> 
> As far as I know, none of these kinds of systems has an open source
> video driver.  The ARM world seems to be horrible that way.

Absolutely true at this time.  Many people are whining about it.
Hopefully some day ARM will design a video core that they release the
specs for.

> From the <http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2012/01/cubox.html> posting:
> 
>     Biggest disappointment so far is the non-mainline kernel, based on
>     old 2.6.32.9. Some mainline support of Armada 510 exist, but will
>     it work with the proprietary graphics code?
> 
> In the Raspberry Pi case, the source is closed but they think that
> they've got a driver that exposes an interface that won't prevent the
> rest of the system from moving forward.  We'll see if that pans out.

At least the i.MX5x seems to finally have drivers for the hardware in
the mainline kernel (except of course the video engine, although the
framebuffer does work, just not the accaleration bits).

> On
> <http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=IMX53QSB>
> there is a link with a description 
> 
> 	IMX53_11_09_LINUX_MMCODECS: Linux Multimedia Codecs
> 	Documentation and Sources 11.09 for i.MX53 for the Quick Start
> 	boards.
> 
> I wonder how that works since Codecs are usually patent-encumbered.

Well if the codecs are provided as a binary blob for the DSP and some
source code for loading it and providing an API, then that would work.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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