Rapping up Raring

Published on December 20, 2013

Archived Notice

This article has been archived and may contain broken links, photos and out-of-date information. If you have any questions, please Contact Us.

Table of Contents

  1. For the impatient
  2. The details
  3. Credits
Sintel-and-Jellyfish gstreamer-and-glmark2-es2

To tie a string around our post about the Linaro Raring images and the post showing how to accelerate video, we've put together an image based on Linaro latest Raring ALIP that contains GPU acceleration and the GStreamer binaries for accelerated video playback and camera access.

Jasbir showed that it could be done, and we wanted to make sure that you have an easy way to test things out.

For the impatient

You can download the SD card image from here:

As usual, you can write the SD card image to disk using zcat and dd under Linux. It requires a 4GB card, and can be extracted like so: 

~/$ sudo umount /dev/sdc?
~/$ zcat alip-gpu-gstreamer-20131219.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc
You can also use Alex Page's USB Image Tool under Windows.

The details

The photos above show gplay playing the 1080P Sintel Movie by the Blender Foundation and the glmark2-es2 benchmark application.

The image is targeted at our most popular Nitrogen6X or BD-SL-i.MX6 boards with a parallel OV5642 camera. Kernels and library trees for the OV5640 MIPI and Nitrogen6_Lite are available in directories beneath /boot/. If you copy one of these trees to the root folder, you can run with those configurations.

i.e., for nitrogen6x_mipi, you can do this: 

~/$ sudo cp -ravf /media/alip/boot/nitrogen6x_mipi/* /media/alip/
~/$ sync && sudo umount /media/alip
and for Nitrogen6_Lite, you can do this: 
~/$ sudo cp -ravf /media/alip/boot/nit6xlite/* /media/alip/
~/$ sync && sudo umount /media/alip

Credits

We need to give many thanks to Jasbir, who put together notes on i.MX6 GPU acceleration on his blog and helped walk us through the somewhat complicated process of patching the X Server to cooperate with the Vivante GPU. In particular, the DRM library needs patching to match the API version used on the Linaro build (it's slightly older than what's used in Yocto).

Jasbir is a real pro, and these are some complicated pieces. We appreciate his support.

As always, let us know how things work for you.