Welcome

[Angus Gratton]

I've created this group because I saw there were a few people working
on Linux kernel development for VIA/Wondermedia VT8500/WM8505 devices
in different places. However, all of the existing communities are
device-specific and not particularly focused on kernel development.

The VT8500 & WM8505 are very low cost SoCs (system-on-a-chips) based
on ARM926EJ-S CPUs. The VT8500 is the older chip, and the WM8505 was
developed after VIA spun off Wondermedia as a subsidiary.

This group is only intended for discussion of Linux kernel
development. If you want to know anything else about running Linux on
these devices, there are great communities already at http://bento-linux.org
(netbooks) and http://www.slatedroid.com/ (tablets.)

The current kernel development I know of is:

Alexey Charkov has a from-scratch clean 2.6.29 kernel at
http://gitorious.org/linux-on-via-vt850 . This is a rewrite trying to
leave out a lot of the non-standard and unusual code from the
Wondermedia release, with an aim (I believe) to be accepted upstream
at some point.

Wondermedia released their original 2.6.29 Android kernel, tarball at
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/08/13/

I have a slightly cleaned up version of that kernel at
http://github.com/projectgus/kernel_wm8505 . However, I'm increasingly
realising that it's going to be very hard to maintain that codebase
compared to a clean one.

Enjoy!

- Angus