I might not be the best to explain this; I'm sure others can explain it better.
As my basic understanding goes:
Most of the drivers, libraries that interface the hardware to the software level is in the Gonk layer : see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Gonk
Some of the configurations for gonk lies within the kernel as well ( boot.img )
Gecko is all software level and has APIs, the engine, etc. see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture .
The system.img that gets flashed with a fastboot flash contains the parts of the gonk, gecko and gaia ( if the gaia is installed to the system partition ).
There's an extract script that ends up extracting the gonk and recompiles those files with our code and creates a new boot.img, system.img
That's what the backup-<device> folder is and is the reason why you were able create the boot.img and system.img It's the product of the extract script. In some devices, like the nexus, the repo for that device is pulled from the source repo ( i.e. from Google's repo ) and that's why we don't need a backup-<device> folder for those devices. We build based on the changes from that repo.
If you have an old backup-<device> folder and not from the latest oem build, if they make changes to fix gonk level bugs; you will not get those fixes.
i.e. there are bugs that we can't necessarily fix in the gecko/gaia. Generally, I try to help releng keep those backup-<device> folders up to date so we don't have to worry about this case for QA / pvtbuilds .
Regards,
Naoki
On May 21, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Stefan Arentz <sar...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> I am obviously confusing gonk and gecko here. I see I can build and flash both, so I'm a happy hacker :-)
>
> S.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> I don't understand the 'we have to extract Gonk from the device' part.
>>
>> Why can't I build and flash the whole thing (gonk & gaia)? Like I've been
>> doing with the Unagi.
>>
>> Is this about binary blobs again? Our build scripts extract those as part of
>> the build, no?
>>
>> Sorry if I sound like a noob but I have not looked at any of this in a while
>> :-/
As we are heading v2.0, there should be no problem with the current "Gonk" provided by the vendor. They actually don't provide Gonk at all, just some private vendor libraries and HAL implementations for Android JB (4.2.2). We use those bits with a lot of other libreries from AOSP to build Gonk, so yes, we are tied in some way to this Android base, but that's not a problem so far. I mean, as the vendor is not going to update their implementations to a newer Android base (JB 4.3 or KK 4.4), we just need to worry about keeping a good support of JB (4.2.2) in Gecko. That should be enough to stay the tablets tuned with latets Gecko/Gaia versions for a long time.
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Naoki Hirata <nhi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
I might not be the best to explain this; I'm sure others can explain it better.
As my basic understanding goes:
Most of the drivers, libraries that interface the hardware to the software level is in the Gonk layer : see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Gonk
Some of the configurations for gonk lies within the kernel as well ( boot.img )
Gecko is all software level and has APIs, the engine, etc. see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture .
The system.img that gets flashed with a fastboot flash contains the parts of the gonk, gecko and gaia ( if the gaia is installed to the system partition ).
There's an extract script that ends up extracting the gonk and recompiles those files with our code and creates a new boot.img, system.img
That's what the backup-<device> folder is and is the reason why you were able create the boot.img and system.img It's the product of the extract script. In some devices, like the nexus, the repo for that device is pulled from the source repo ( i.e. from Google's repo ) and that's why we don't need a backup-<device> folder for those devices. We build based on the changes from that repo.
If you have an old backup-<device> folder and not from the latest oem build, if they make changes to fix gonk level bugs; you will not get those fixes.
i.e. there are bugs that we can't necessarily fix in the gecko/gaia. Generally, I try to help releng keep those backup-<device> folders up to date so we don't have to worry about this case for QA / pvtbuilds .
Regards,
Naoki
On May 21, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Stefan Arentz <sar...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> I am obviously confusing gonk and gecko here. I see I can build and flash both, so I'm a happy hacker :-)
>
> S.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> I don't understand the 'we have to extract Gonk from the device' part.
>>
>> Why can't I build and flash the whole thing (gonk & gaia)? Like I've been
>> doing with the Unagi.
>>
>> Is this about binary blobs again? Our build scripts extract those as part of
>> the build, no?
>>
>> Sorry if I sound like a noob but I have not looked at any of this in a while
>> :-/
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