gta02a5 prototype #30 brief review

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Hi guys,

this is a short gta02a5 prototype #30 review. I want to run this through you 
before adding stuff to the bugtracker since I'm not sure which is hardware 
related and which is kernel related.

Executive summary: An order of magnitude less problems compared to v4. Things 
are really falling in place.

Details now -- note that this review is based on kernel and rootfs from 
Friday, 22th, so some things may already be fixed. Also note I did use it 
with a standard battery.

* device contained a gta02v4 bootloader, migration to a nor-enabled v5 was 
easy.

* on bootup, the device started to crackle and was _very_ slow. Further 
debugging lead us to the J6 GPIO which was not initialized. Setting it to 1 
made the system usable and stopped the audio crackles.

* vibrator is very weak, i guess this is a hardware problem, right?

* audio is a bit on the soft side, did the amp change or is it a software 
problem?

* screen and buttons work fine

* BT and GPS power nodes are only in a very deeply embedded i2c subdir, 
whereas the other device nodes are in /sys/devices/.

* after enabling the BT power node, no bluetooth model is found on USB.

* GPS module works ok, very impressive actually, we even got a fix inside the 
ICE (which has very thick windows).

* Wifi module works ok, but has some quirks. First, reception was not that 
good, second, there are some driver problems with the wireless extensions not 
being fully supported. you can't set the channel in ad-hoc mode, link quality 
has bogus values (x/y, x >= y), when you scan and there is nothing found, 
iwlist eth0 scan hangs with:
    eth0      Failed to read scan data : Resource temporarily unavailable
kernel says:
  AR6000 scan complete: 0
  ar6000_ioctl_giwscan(): data length 0
  [repeated 20 times]

* the LEDs do not turn off (echo 0 keeps them slightly on)

* the blue LED can not be turned on

* xrandr -o 2 just crashes the X server, --output default --rotate left does 
not work

* There's an interesting xglamo xrender performance problem vs. software 
rendering. I'll post more details after running a benchmark.

* I got a LEDPWRFAIL in dmesg:
  PCF50633_INT4_LEDPWRFAIL

* NOT tested yet:
 * accellerometer
 * suspend/resume from various sources
 * RTC

Further questions:

* What's the plan regarding support for non-coloumb-counter batteries? apm did 
not show any sane values. Interestingly after some time, I got a BATTFULL 
message from PCF -- is this correct?

* battemp and friends do not contain information yet.

Cheers,

:M: