topic Re: Anybody else feel stranded? in i.MX Processors

Anybody else feel stranded?

muddflapps — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:58:17 GMT

The LTIB release for iMX28 was a nice package released by Freescale. It worked as advertised (mostly) and allowed a quick bring-up and easy development.

Now it's showing its age rather badly. Though the mainstream kernel has mxs_defconfig with the MX28EVK supported as a target, it's not a even trade for all the functionality in the FSL BSP and I haven't seen any sign that FreeScale intends to upgrade their release.

I could do all that work but our hope was that by selecting this product that it would be supported so we could invest our efforts in applications development instead of systems programming.

Does anyone think the LTIB package for iMX28 will ever be updated again? Alternative recommendations would also be appreciated.

Re: Anybody else feel stranded?

SamGandhi — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:45:54 GMT

Yup we are in the same boat. We are moving our development to using 3.4-rc1 and finding that many of the features are missing example SPI drivers, USB host driver, DCP drivers On various mailing list there have been posts by folks working at Freescale for these drivers but somehow these drivers are not getting upstreamed. It almost feels like MX28 is an orphan/abandoned chipset for freescale and we might have made wrong decision in choosing this processor for our design. More and more its important to go with partner that provides updated kernel drivers for their SOCs.

Re: Anybody else feel stranded?

RobertSchwebel — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:10:07 GMT

Hi,

We did a lot of work in the community to bring i.MX28 into the mainline kernel, so if you try a modern kernel like 3.5, it really has a lot of features for MX28. So if you need something current, join in and use mainline! I don't know about LTIB as we are usually working with ptxdist for our board support packages (and it makes it very easy to update to modern kernels), but it probably shouldn't be a big deal to put a modern kernel there.

Regards,

Robert

Re: Anybody else feel stranded?

RobertSchwebel — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:12:42 GMT

Hi Sam,

I don't think your statement is correct: the FSL mainline developers are doing a lot of work to upstream MX28 features, and others in the community do that as well.

SPI is there
USB host is on the way, due to the Synopsys desaster. You need about 120 patches at the moment, but it can be done on a recent kernel and all of that is on the way to mainline.

DCP is not supported so far. The mainline model is: if you need it, write it, or let somebody else write it. That's how all of what we have in mainline today came into existence!

Regards,

Robert

Re: Anybody else feel stranded?

VladanJovanovic — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:20:14 GMT

LTIB and kernel versions are two separate discussions.

When it comes to LTIB, I believe there should be some support for i.MX28 in Yocto, although haven't had time to try it out.

Re: Anybody else feel stranded?

daiane_angolini — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 12:41:34 GMT

Yocto support for imx28 is nice (in my point of view). I don´t use it directly, but I´m in contact with the project and I see mx28 is getting better and better every day.

Please, take the source code and give it a try:

https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform

Any question will be welcome in mail list:

http://groups.google.com/group/meta-fsl-arm