Daily Snapshot Review 13 Feb 2008

[Kevin Dean]

Yesterday I forgot my USB cable. In addition to being unable to flash
my Neo, I ended up having to charge it when I got home. So, needless
to say I've missed the 12 Feb 2008 review and I won't be doing one :)

Today marks a good and a bad day in the snapshot progress. First and
foremost, today is the first day a 2.6.24 kernel was generated as part
of the daily snapshot process! Congrats to the kernel development team
on this, I understand that merging the OM specific changes wasn't an
easy process for the GTA01 and they did it!

Today marked a signifigant jump in boot time, almost an additional
minute. It appeared as if this additional delay came "somewhere in the
middle" of the boot process, where it hung for about 45 to 60 seconds
before resuming a normal speed boot.

On the other side of this, a lot of stuff "broke". I say broke because
I have a feeling that the problem isn't so much the kernel but a lack
of modules in the default image that correspond TO the new kernel. The
rootfs contains /lib/modules/2.6.22 yadda yadda and contains only a
smaller subset of 2.6.24 modules. This is consistant with the problems
I had in today's review which can be found at:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Snapshot_review/2008-02-13

In general, anything "phone related" broke. The GSM modem isn't
initialized which means the device never connects with the cellular
network. Incoming and outgoing calls don't work. Also, SMS messaging
doesn't work, either incoming or outgoing. I've noticed that the first
time I attempt to launch media player it fails. The second launch then
works. This appears to have been a pattern in my previous reviews but
I haven't mentioned it since it wasn't repeatable. I just now made the
connection that it always happens on a CLEAN flash (perhaps the first
time probes for a config file, doesn't find it, creates one and dies
and then loads fine the second time, since the file is there?)

In other media player news, because of the limited subset of kernel
modules, today's images didn't detect my media card (or more
precisely, I don't think it detected the default vfat filesystem -
dmesg seemed to reference mmc devices) I didn't have media to test. I
didn't see any commits to media-player today or yesterday, so I'll
assume that media-player WOULD work if it could find my media.

My suggestion is that users needing functionality stay with the 11 Feb
2008 image. I do, however, also recommend that if you have time and
moderate understanding of *NIX you collect as much information for the
developers as possible. Any developers reading this list that see a
problem they want to tackle please feel free to demand more info from
me, just let me know how to get it. ;)

In addition to today's review, I've added the SnapshotReview category
thanks to Markus Schlichting. This means that you can visit
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:SnapshotReview and scroll to
the bottom to see the latest review. This page is automatically
updated every time a snapshot is added and will allow people to see
snapshots from older reviews for comparison and nostalgia. :)

Just for fun, I flashed a 2.6.22 kernel using today's rootfs. Sound
didn't work, so I didn't test further.

-Kevin Dean