i.MX515 Project
Mandriva Linux portin category Linux Distributions
proposed by blino on 10th January 2010 (accepted on 1st September 2010)
Project Summary
Mandriva is currently developing an ARM port of its Mandriva Linux operating system, which can run on a wide range of platforms, from netbooks to servers.The Mandriva Linux distribution officially supports x86 and MIPS, and the ARMv5 port is basically ready, though not official. We would like to bring i.MX515 as an officially supported SoC in the distribution, and extend it to platforms like netbooks and set-top box, to leverage our offering.
Our company has experience in managing ports to non-x86 architectures, the MIPS port for the Gdium is a good example.
We also have extensive experience in ARM, with developers in France and Brazil.
For example, Arnaud Patard from Mandriva is an ARM developer already involved in the ARM kernel community (see kernel commits).
Project Blog Entries
A few days ago, we received the Efika MX for our Mandriva Linux port project, in our Mandriva office in Paris.
Our target in the end is to merge Efika MX and Freescal i.MX51 support, and make our user-friendly distribution available the upcoming Efika MX Smartbook, using our netbook-oriented desktop from Mandriva Mini.
Before getting the Efika MX, we already built (natively) a Mandriva Linux port with ARMv5 as target. So, in just a few minutes, we managed to get in our Mandriva Linux chroot on the Efika MX, and run the X graphical server and GNOME desktop from Mandriva :-)
Then, we used the SD card installer from Genesi, and modified it to include our Mandriva Linux chroot.
As a result, after playing with DIP switches to boot from SD card by default, we now have the Efika MX booting on our Mandriva Linux, standalone.
This work is for now based on Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (2009.1), and we will do a public release in the coming weeks.
We are still using the EfikaMX kernel from Genesi for now, but we plan to merge the patches in the main Mandriva kernel, to factorize the kernel maintainance for our products.
Next on our roadmap is the inclusion of the imx graphical driver and multimedia codecs (from the Freescale i.MX51 Linux SDK), which we started already.
Finally, we will merge our ARM port patches back in the Mandriva Cooker development distribution, so that the next Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring (2010.1) distribution is ARM-ready by default!
In the meantime, we demoed the Efika MX at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussel last week-end, and it got a bunch of attention!
Here are a few pics from the event, courtesy of Wolfgang Bornath (wobo) from the Mandriva German community: