Third impressions, featuring kernel bugs

[Mikko Rauhala]

I've received encouragement to continue my "impressions" series, so I
shall for now, at least as far as I have something to say. Today's
episode features bugs that belong in the 'zilla, really. I'll try and
stick them in later today, when I'm hopefully less tired (if they're not
up already). This flow is easier to write for now, and at least we get
some written record right away, no?

So. Bugs. Kernel bugs, even. These ones actually took me a bit by
surprise, as I did expect stuff like USB and memory cards to mostly
work. I still managed to suppress panic, and studied the issues a bit
yesterday so I could do a proper writeup and bug reports.

MicroSD. I started copying a bunch of music onto the microSD with scp,
but pretty quickly into the process I hit an I/O error on writing to the
card. Restoring predictable behaviour seemed to require a reboot. Tried
again. Soonish, I/O error. Limited scp to 500 kbps (-l 500). I/O error.
Limited scp to 100 kbps. Everything works fine (well, writes to the
microSD work fine, we'll get to the other snag I hit at this point
next). So, apparently the sd driver has some bugs that exhibit
themselves under non-light loads.

And the other thing. Some time into the transfer, the Neo started
disconnecting from the USB bus, disrupting USBnet. The host sees it as a
bona fide USB disconnect. Unplugging and replugging the USB cable helps
to reinitialize the usbnet, but the problem repeated itself every few
minutes. Tried different ports on the computer, and one on my monitor's
hub, plus different cables, with the same result. Didn't think to check
Neo's dmesg yesterday, and the bug has not yet reproduced itself today
(the Neo is doing heavy usbnet I/O here right now to try and trigger
something).

Someone (I forget who, sorry) on the IRC channel said having had similar
problems, and suggested that the Neo may be overloading the USB host,
drawing too much current, causing the bus to reset. May be, I don't
know; the host's dmesg merely said "USB disconnect", though, nothing
about the reason.

As these bugs have presented themselves, one has mysteriously vanished:
I can now unmount the microsd card without umount complaining about
inappropriate ioctl for device. I have done nothing to fix this, but
there it is.

As an aside, played around a bit with running remote X apps on the Neo,
to get some feel of the possibilities. Ran things like glines, dopewars,
firefox, openoffice... Ok, the OO.org was just for the hell of it, but
Firefox was actually useful. Tried also changing screen orientation with
xrandr in that context, as browsing is more convenient that way. (And
yes I have good eyes ;)

Anyway, while doing this, it really did strike me that this is not just
for kicks, but running remote X apps _does_ concretely increase the uses
for the Neo. Not perhaps everyone's piece of cake, and not something you
want to be doing over GPRS. Still, I can see myself using the Neo
sometimes as an X terminal eg. on the couch at home over Bluetooth, or a
random wifi hotspot on the move (come GTA02). I have 2M upstream at
home, have run X apps over that before, and the VGA resolution helps
limit bandwidth requirements.

Still haven't dared take the plastic off the screen except to peek in.
Looking into screen protectors, but premade ones seem to be by handset
model, not by size. Asked pdair.com, no go. Query now at
pdascreenprotectors.com if they happen to have a suitable size or can
produce one. FIC should do these things come mass market as well. I very
much don't like the idea of wear and tear on not-easily-replaceable
parts over this beautiful display.

Oh, and while playing some of the oggs I copied onto the Neo, the
quality of the speakers surprised me. Of course one dares not talk about
hifi with mobile speakers, but still, it's better than I expected; I
shant be ashamed to demo a piece of music out loud on the Neo. I hear
one of the speakers will have to go for GTA02, so the wifi will fit, but
that's no biggie; if one wants stereo from a handset, one wants
headphones anyway.

Still using these:
uImage-2.6.21.6-moko10-r1_0_0_2388_0-fic-gta01.bin
openmoko-devel-image-fic-gta01-20070728081358.rootfs.jffs2

Moko on.

-- 
Mikko Rauhala   - mjr at iki.fi     - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/>
Transhumanist   - WTA member     - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/>
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>