Several OMAP/Beagle patches land upstream for Linux 2.6.33

I'm feeling pretty happy and excited today looking at the patches Linus Torvalds has recently merged into the Linux kernel mainline, such as a huge patch set from Tony Lindgren[1]. I'm particularly happy to see that DSS2 is there[2], so there shouldn't be any more confusion about what display driver to use on OMAP. The USB EHCI (host port) driver also finally got merged[5]. I also see a large number of power management patches being included.

Baseline support for several OMAP3 systems has also been included, including the Always Innovating Touch Book[3], AM3517 EVM[6], IGEPv2[7], CM-T35[8], OMAP3630 Zoom-3[9] and some updates for the OpenPandora[4]. Many of the OMAP3 development boards[10] and open development platforms are still not listed or easy to find in the Kconfig descriptions or board instance files.

A large number of bug fixes are also included.

It typically takes Linus 2-3 weeks to put together the first release candidate. After that, it typically takes 2-3 months to hammer out the bugs enough to make the the release. I'm looking forward to seeing great testing and contributions from the OMAP and BeagleBoard communities following the release of Linux 2.6.33-rc1!!

[1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=9c3936cb694ffd559c80dc3eb75b61f769a39259
[2] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/arm/OMAP/DSS
[3] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=7a079cab4632265fc87ee483daf57879d5dd87f2
[4] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=8d88f7f70cca3fa6aabac287fccd40cebacb92d1
[5] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=54ab2b02ef6a454b4cca969f546d0dd43fec7308
[6] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=c625327e2f5a506a89563e14ed837c82fa61548f
[7] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=58e111621d402d41cb0cabae7c532d6194b7d943
[8] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=2886d128d8ff83af88b9cbe6dbf7f0d2bbee8d76
[9] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=5f35fbe8b8a05743fb9686e33194a126cd4273f6
[10] http://wiki.omap.com/index.php?title=OMAP3_Boards

NEON training

One of the most important aspects of the BeagleBoard.org community is that I'm mostly irrelevant. This means that I'm not a bottleneck to the important things that happen in the community. Unfortunately, it also means that I'm also not always in-the-loop on great events coming up that utilize the BeagleBoard and getting the word out to everyone on-time. Even so, I imagine a lot of you are going to the ARM Techcon3 and can make use of this nice litte bit of hands-on training using the BeagleBoard that I learned about from Ken Havens:

Turning the NEON Light On (Hands-on Workshop)
Wednesday, Oct 21 3:00pm - 4:30pm
TechMart: San Jose room

Friday, Oct 23 10:00am - 11:30am
TechMart: San Jose room

This seminar will be a hands-on introduction to NEON (the SIMD extension on Cortex-A processors) using Beagleboards running Ubuntu Linux. Attendees should be software engineers with some prior experience of armcc or gcc with an interest in low-level software optimizations.

A pair of EDN Innovation winners

The "OMAP35x Application Processor" and the "Beagle Board Embedded Linux Development Board" were both winners of tonight's EDN Innovation 2008 awards for their respective categories of "Microprocessors" and "Software/Embedded Tools". It was a great evening, with several great products recognized and it was nice to have our products among those. It was a great way to follow up a successful day of hands-on classes at the Embedded Systems Conference on the BeagleBoard. Too bad Boris wasn't there to accept the honors himself. :)