Mediatek MT6235 status (Sciphone G2)

This is merely a historical archive of years 2008-2021, before the migration to mailman3.

A maintained and still updated list archive can be found at https://lists.osmocom.org/hyperkitty/list/baseband-devel@lists.osmocom.org/.

Marcin.Mielczarczyk at tieto.com Marcin.Mielczarczyk at tieto.com
Thu Feb 17 14:23:09 UTC 2011


Hi list,

After some break finally I managed to describe and commit all changes made to MT6235 Linux port during last one and the half month.
Currently I got full Angstrom Linux distribution running with UI.
Now you can run everything what I'm writing below without changing Sciphone's original firmware. Just use osmocon to load U-Boot to RAM and SD card which has rootfs (with Linux kernel placed in /boot/uImage).

For the beginning I chose OPIE, which runs on both versions of Sciphone - with 32MB and 64MB of RAM.
OPIE is based on Qtopia which is lightweight and runs pretty fast on MT6235.
When you run OPIE on Sciphone G2 it works as full blown PDA. In OPIE there is no telephony support.

I also ran X window server with blackbox and matchbox window managers.
It runs fine with this difference that sometimes I got oops messages concerning memory on phones with 32MB of RAM . I'll investigate it in the future.
Next step is running SHR and Android (probably only on 64MB versions).
Android will be working very slow, but from marketing point of view "Android" is magic word so I guess it'll bring more interest into project.

For building Linux distributions I chose OpenEmbedded where you can build a lot of Linux variations.
To be able to do this I prepared patch which adds Sciphone G2 target and adds U-Boot and Linux kernel repositories from OsmocomBB project.
All details regarding OE are described on wiki:

http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/SciphoneDreamG2

With above patches you're able now to build Linux distribution with any configuration by yourself (Angtrom, SHR, QTE, OPIE, GPE, etc.).

Video presenting how Angstrom Linux with OPIE is running on Sciphone G2 is placed under following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_guRruQi0I

As you can see, there is already new OsmocomBB logo. When it's on white background, it means that U-Boot is running, when it's on black background it menas that Linux is starting up.
On above video I used phone (32MB of RAM) which has only U-Boot flashed, everything else is running from SD card.

Unfortunatelly OPIE has a lot of elements on boarders of screen (scrolling, application close, etc.) and Sciphone's touchscreen has pretty bad quality and it doesn't work well. You have to be patient while operating it. In the middle of screen it works pretty well. I'm going to improve touchscreen driver, so hopefully it'll work better.

I prepared ready to load images from above presentation for people who want to try it out without building:

http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/marcin/sciphone_g2_mt6235/images/

Below is short status what's going on now in Linux work.

Peripherals which are already running under Linux:
1) GPIO
2) clocks
3) timers
4) SD card
5) LCD frame buffer
6) touch screen
7) keypad
8) NAND - not yet finished under Linux as I had no motivation to finish it (it fully runs under U-Boot)
9) RTC - not yet integrated
10) U-Boot has been rebased to newest version and commit history was cleaned - preparations for mainlining of Sciphone G2 port

Topics on which we're working now:

1) rebase Sicphone's kernel to newest version
2) USB
3) Audio - needs to know how DSP is working
4) Android porting

I hope above software will also run on your devices.

BR,
Marcin

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/baseband-devel/attachments/20110217/e3321722/attachment.htm>


More information about the baseband-devel mailing list