i.MX515 Project
Port of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries plus the E17 desktopin category Applications & Software
proposed by lfelipe on 8th February 2009 (accepted on 2nd July 2010)
Project Summary
Proposal: to port the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) plus the Enlightenment DR17 desktop (E17) to the imx515, doing the necessary changes, optimizations and packaging.Why: the EFL are a really nice set of libraries for application development, specially for embedded devices. They are well suited for a range of purposes, and allow development of applications that can easily be retargetted to different devices. The E17 desktop environment is both lightweight and beautiful, and though it has not been officially released yet, it has been considered mature for quite some time and has been adopted as the official desktop environment by a few linux distributions already (such as Yellow Dog Linux).
How: my work would start by compiling and testing each of the dependencies for E17, making sure all of them are working, and if any problems arise, try to fix them and send the patches upstream. After having the majority of the EFL and E17 running, then I'd start compiling some of the applications that use it (such as the media center Rage). In order to do this, I'd basically need the device with a way of accessing a terminal on it (ethernet + ssh preferably, but a serial port could work as well) and a display (vga-out or other could also work).
Background: I work for a company called ProFUSION Embedded Systems. Lately I've been working there on a project called Canola, a media center for Nokia's Internet Tablets (which are ARM based) that was developed in Python using the EFL (unfortunately not yet open source, but if it already is by the time this project starts, I'd like to port it as well). I've also, as part of my work there, packaged X.Org and EFL + E17 for Ltib so we could develop a sample music player on the iMX31. As a result of this, I was given commit access to Ltib's CVS repository. I've already sent a bunch of patches to the EFL and to other free software projects. On my blog there are a few posts regarding those projects. If any more information is needed, please contact me.
Project Blog Entries
The EFL have a benchmark program called expedite that runs a series of tests to measure rendering speed of the device. Here is a chart comparing the output of running it on the Efika and on an Asus Eee 701 (Celeron 900mhz CPU):
Expedite Comparison Chart
Notice that the EFL that is running on the Efika is not completely optimized yet, and the main difference in this case being that the Eee has SSE2 and other SIMD optimizations enabled, and the Efika version was compiled without NEON support. I'm moving to a new apartment this weekend and am already without internet access at home, but I'll soon try to get the benchmark with NEON enabled to get a better comparison going.