Android Froyo release 9.2 for i.MX

Published on December 7, 2010

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Freescale's moving fast on the Android front. It appears that our blog posts are a couple of versions behind.Release 9.1 from Freescale included a large number of fixes and enhancements:

Add HW support to i.MX508 RD board
More stable suspend/resume in various use cases (e.g. suspend/resume when idle / audio playback / camera preview)
More stable camera/camcorder function
Improved 720p TVout performance on i.MX51
Add back dual SD and u-disk
Add back Factory reset and SW update (EXT4/SD only, UBI/NAND will be in next release)
Add back dual display
Add speech codec
Reduced Android bootup time (35s -> 25s)
Power consumption in all typical use case are now equal to R8.1 (we have higher power consumption in R9)

And release 9.2 added even more:

Higher CTS pass rate - only 5 failure cases left among all 23480 cases
- 2 failures are caused by wrong CTS test case
- 1 failure is caused by missing G-sensor HW in our board
- 2 failures are caused by missing Google Map service in our delivery
Add back "Recovery on UBI/NAND"
Note: Android file system can be on NAND but boot from NAND is not verified in R9.2
Add RGB888 support in Framework to support 24bit LCD
More stable USB mass storage operation (e.g. copy several GB files into SD card via USB)
Fix memory leak when running 3D app which will cause system freeze after running/exit a 3D app for many times
Fix high CPU usage issue when showing livewallpaper
Fix system freeze issue when receiving a phone call during video playback
Fix suspend/resume issue when playback video
Fix demo app issue and add a new demo for handwriting over text in i.MX508
Fix many codec related bugs

Our early experiences show the R9.2 release to be more stable and more responsive, and we recommend that all of our customers using Android upgrade as soon as is convenient.The following notes will walk through steps to get -R9.2 up and running without too much in the way of commentary. For descriptions of the various components, we'll refer you to the original Android porting posts:

To begin with, you'll need to download the R9.2 package from Freescale and we'll follow the instructions in /opt/imx-android-r9.2/doc/i.MX_Android_R9.2_User_Guide.html with just a few exceptions:

Get Android Source Code

Get core Android sources:

$ cd ~
$ mkdir myandroid
$ cd myandroid
$ curl https://android.git.kernel.org/repo > ./repo
$ chmod a+x ./repo
$ ./repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b froyo
$ cp /opt/imx-android-r9.2/code/r9.2/default.xml .repo/manifests/default.xml
$ ./repo sync

Use Boundary Devices kernel and bootloader

Get the Boundary Devices kernel instead of the one from kernel.org:

$ cd ~/myandroid
$ git clone https://boundarydevices.com/git-repos/linux-bd.git/ kernel_imx

Get the Boundary Devices U-Boot repository instead of the one from Denx.de:

$ cd ~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader
$ git clone https://boundarydevices.com/git-repos/u-boot-nitrogen.git uboot-imx

If you're going to use the Unigen wireless LAN adapter, install it in external/rtl8172:

$ cd ~/myandroid/bootable/external/ && git clone https://boundarydevices.com/git-repos/rtl8172.git/

Apply Freescale patches

$ cd ~/myandroid
$ . /opt/imx-android-r9.2/code/r9.2/and_patch.sh
$ help                  # You should see "c_patch" function
$ c_patch /opt/imx-android-r9.2/code/r9.2 freescale_patches

Apply Boundary Devices patches

To make life a bit easier, we're placing a repo diffon our web-site at https://boundarydevices.com/imx_android_r9.2_boundary20101207.diff and will add comments with links to as we update things.

Prepare and compile non-Android components

The Linux kernel and U-Boot aren't build as a part of the Android build process so you'll need to compile them by hand.Note that there are dependencies on kernel versions and Android components (especially the hardware acceleration APIs). You should use the boundary20101115 branch when building the 9.2 release of Android.We also suggest that you use the boundary20101115 branch of U-Boot, but only because it's the latest.Linux kernel:

~$ cd myandroid/kernel_imx
~/myandroid/kernel_imx$ git checkout origin/boundary20101115 -b boundary20101115
~/myandroid/kernel_imx$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- nitrogen_android_defconfig
~/myandroid/kernel_imx$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- uImage modules
...

U-Boot:

~$ cd myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx
~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx$ git checkout origin/boundary20101115 -b boundary20101115
~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- nitrogen_config
~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- all
...
~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- nitrogen_bootscript

Compile Android

We still haven't separated our board from the Freescale Babbage, so the Android compilation process is the same as in the Freescale release notes:

~$ cd myandroid/
~/myandroid$ make PRODUCT-imx51_bbg-eng 2>&1 | tee build_imx51_bbg_android.log
...

Create SD card

Since our original post on building Android, we've switched all of our boards to boot to serial EEPROM and are recommending that customers use boot scripts, so the setup of the boot partition has changed. The Freescale Android release also changed the mount commands in init.rc to ext4, so we've done the same.The first step is still to partition the disk. The following is a pretty hairy command-line that will wipe out any existing partitions on your SD card and create a set of 6 partitions for Android.

user@host:~$ echo -e "dn1ndn2ndn3ndn4nnnpn1nn+100Mnnnpn2nn+200Mnnnen3nn+300Mnnnpnnnnnn+100Mnnnn+100Mnnnnntn1nbntn2n83ntn4n83ntn5n83ntn6n83ntn7nbnwn" | sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
user@host:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3999 MB, 3999268864 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 122048 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk0p1               1        3201      102424    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/mmcblk0p2            3202        9602      204832   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3            9603       19203      307232    5  Extended
/dev/mmcblk0p4           19204      122048     3291040   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p5            9603       12803      102424   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p6           12804       16004      102424   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p7           16005       19203      102360    b  W95 FAT32

The following commands will create filesystems in the

user@host:~$ sudo mkdosfs /dev/mmcblk0p1 -n BOOT
user@host:~$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2 -L SYSTEM
user@host:~$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p4 -L MEDIA
user@host:~$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p5 -L DATA
user@host:~$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p6 -L CACHE
user@host:~$ sudo mkdosfs /dev/mmcblk0p7 -n RECOVERY
user@host:~$ sync

At this stage, you'll want to remove and re-insert your SD card to allow Linux to auto-mount the partitions for copying. If your development station uses gnome-volume-manager, you should see mounts like the following:

user@host:~$ mount | grep /media | sort
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /media/BOOT type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,flush)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 on /media/SYSTEM type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks)
/dev/mmcblk0p4 on /media/MEDIA type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks)
/dev/mmcblk0p5 on /media/DATA type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks)
/dev/mmcblk0p6 on /media/CACHE type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks)
/dev/mmcblk0p7 on /media/RECOVERY type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,flush)

At this point, you're ready to copy files onto the SD card.The /BOOT partition needs at least a kernel (uImage) and RAM-disk (initrd.u-boot), but you should probably place a boot script and your U-Boot image on the SD card as well, so you know precisely what version is running:

user@host:~$ cp -fv ~/myandroid/kernel_imx/arch/arm/boot/uImage /media/BOOT
user@host:~$ mkimage -A arm -O linux -T ramdisk -n "Initial Ram Disk"
                      -d ~/myandroid/out/target/product/imx51_bbg/ramdisk.img
                      /media/BOOT/initrd.u-boot
user@host:~$ cp -fv ~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx/mx51_ubl_ecspi.bin /media/BOOT/u-boot-nitrogen-20101207.bin
user@host:~$ cp -fv ~/myandroid/bootable/bootloader/uboot-imx/nitrogen_bootscript /media/BOOT/nitrogen_bootscript-20101207

The /SYSTEM and /DATApartitions are copied straight out of the Android build tree:

user@host:~$ cp -afvr ~/myandroid/out/target/product/imx51_bbg/system/* /media/SYSTEM/
user@host:~$ cp -afvr ~/myandroid/out/target/product/imx51_bbg/data/* /media/DATA

The /RECOVERY, /MEDIA, and /CACHE partitions aren't created by the Android build process, so we won't go into the details here.Don't forget to sync the filesystems before removing the card:

user@host:~$ sync && sudo umount /media/*