Looking for beta testers who have a BeagleBoard-xM

[Thomas Cort]

I've been working on enhancements to Minix's frame buffer driver that allow it to detect the supported resolutions of the connected display via EDID (extended display identification data) and automatically configure the frame buffer driver with a resolution that works well with the display and the board. I'm looking for some people to help test my code as I only have 1 physical monitor to test with in addition to the Linaro QEMU simulator. If you'd like to help, please read on.

Note, this only works with the BeagleBoard-xM. The BeagleBone isn't supported by the frame buffer driver yet.

Test Instructions

1. Connect a display to your BeagleBoard-xM. It should work with most HDMI/DVI displays.
2. Boot a BeagleBoard-xM with my patches. Steps to obtain, build, and boot my code are provided here: http://minix-i2c.blogspot.ca/2013/06/minix-on-beagleboard-xm.html
3. Log in as root and run the splash program
1. # splash
4. Observe the screen. If it worked, you should see some raccoons ( like this photo ). To stop the splash program, use Ctrl+C.

If it works

Please e-mail me at linu...@gmail.com to let me know. If you can, also include a description of your display (make, model, etc).

If it doesn't work

Please e-mail me at linu...@gmail.com with your display's EDID. Here are the steps to get the EDID:

1. Read the EDID and store the contents in a file
1. # dd if=/dev/eepromb3s50 of=/root/eeprom.dat count=1 bs=128
2. E-mail me the data. You can either send me that file as an attachment (it should be on the 2nd partition of the SD card) or copy and paste the output of `hexdump -C /root/eeprom.dat` into the e-mail body.

Thanks,

Thomas

[Thomas Cort]

Hello,

I'm still looking for a tester or two to try out some changes I made
to the frame buffer code for the BeagleBoard-xM. I'm just trying to
confirm that it works with a variety of displays, not just mine,
before submitting the patches to mainline Minix.

I've made testing a bit easier by providing a pre-built image so that
testers don't have to cross build a whole operating system to try it.
The test is pretty simple and shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. You
just need a BeagleBoard-xM, a serial cable, and monitor.

The test image will be here for the next few days:
http://www.tomcort.com/tmp/minix_arm_sd.img.xz (about 33MB)

Here are the md5sums for the compressed image and after it's uncompressed:
8f8b93c0bd7314c38e8e6f5f5305a77e minix_arm_sd.img.xz
2632e54eb641953778de5f32215bf26f minix_arm_sd.img

To use the image, uncompress it with `unxz` (it should expand to about 2GB):
$ unxz minix_arm_sd.img.xz

Then write the image to an SD card. Change sdX to the right device
file for your SD card (be sure any prior SD card partitions are
unmounted):
# dd if=minix_arm_sd.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M oflag=direct

Then, plug in the monitor and serial cable. Insert the SD card and
start a terminal emulator. Here's how I start picocom with my
USB-to-Serial adapter:
$ picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0

Apply power to the BeagleBoard-xM. It should boot up. Next, log in as
root (no password needed) and run the splash program.

# splash

Observe the screen. If it worked, you should see some raccoons ( like this

photo: http://imgur.com/ePgremy ). To stop the splash program, use Ctrl+C.