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GTA01 and GTA02 Fixes and Other Updates

So, what is this all about anyway?

What's it about? the Openmoko GTA01 (Neo) and GTA02 (Freerunner) phones, of course. It's about whatever I happen to be working on at the moment -- things like suspend/resume issues, general kernel patches and fixes, and most recently, the "bouncy rubber calypso" problem.

For what images and devices?

Both GTA01 and GTA02 devices will be supported, but the firmware images in use will vary. Right now I'm focusing on the Qtopia and FSO images. Qtopia fits the need for a functional phone, and FSO is clearly the future and the ideal image for developers.

The best image Openmoko had was 2007.2; it's a victim of the ill-considered ASU image. SHR will fuse the old 2007.2 GTK-based user apps with the new backend from FSO -- but SHR is not released yet. SHR should be able to take any of the updates/fixes for the FSO, so that should be painless and easy.

Unfortunately, none of the ASU (2008.8, 2008.9) releases have worked well enough to be useful. And a side effect of that makes the situation worse -- everybody constantly updates, so issuing patches for any one build is not a particularly useful thing to do. And to be completely honest, I just fail to understand the point of the 2008.x image. Never-the-less, if one particular ASU build should ever be both interesting and repeatably-buildable, I'll probably put some patches or update out for that as well.

Where can I find this stuff?

What sort of other changes are available?

At present, debugging and diagnostic information, mainly.

The Low-Battery problem

While suspended, both the GTA01 and GTA02 will happily let the battery drain down to the point where it's so flat that it won't even boot the device again.

The solution for this problem is different for each device (the GTA02 supports a battery-low interrupt that can wake it; the GTA01 has no such support), but currently there is no kernel support for either.

The GTA01 buffer overflow problem

There remains an outstanding problem on the GTA01 where it appears that the GSM fails to honor flow-control signals, and overruns the UART. This results in dropped characters, which usually results in the confusion of and ultimate failure of the software managing the GSM.

This problem remains unresolved. To borrow from Thomas Edison, it's not that we've had complete failure to solve this problem, rather we now know many ways to not fix this problem.

However, the suspend/resume fixes have proven to reduce the likelihood of this occuring, to the point where few people actually see this happening. Work continues on this issue to see what can be done to work around this GSM problem in software.

Note: This problem has not been reported on the GTA02, probably becuase the FIFO in the GTA02 UART is considerably larger.

Why haven't these changes been submitted to Openmoko for inclusion?

They have been.

Well, then why aren't these changes incorporated in Openmoko's software?

Most of them have been!

Others are in progress, or under discussion. Some small number have been rejected; check the Openmoko mailing list archives for the discussions around those if you're interested (the objection is often that the fix won't be accepted into the Linux mainstream. From my point-of-view, I agree that some of these changes do not meet the very stringent criteria to be considered suitable for inclusion into the general Linux source code -- and I'll happily remove these changes from this site as soon as Openmoko or anyone else comes up with a better solution for the problems my patches and changes address.)

The beauty of open source is that the community can address problems ourselves when necessary.

Are you trying to fork the Openmoko project?

Absolutely not. I spend a great deal of effort to push the changes into the official software - generally with good success.

Why should I trust the binaries on this site?

Source code is provided for all changes, in the form of either complete sources, or in the form of patches to the official sources.

Who do I contact if...

Email to the standard Openmoko mailing lists, or ask questions on the standard #openmoko IRC channel.

Why is your web site so ugly?

Because I have better things to do with my time than maintain web sites. :)