Known Issues:
* Composite video out does not work
Selecting composite video out (see README) causes the system to hang
on boot. Investigation of this is pending.
See the README for a list of currently supported boards.
Enjoy,
Hans
And to make sure everyone reads the README, let me print it here
in full:
Fedora 18 ARM for Allwinner A10 devices README
----------------------------------------------
Quickstart guide
----------------
1) Insert an sdcard, note any data on the card will be destroyed!
2) Make sure the card is not mounted, run "mount" and if the card shows
up in the output umount its partitions
3) Write the img file to the card, ie as root do:
xzcat Fedora-18-Beta-a10-armhfp.img > /dev/mmcblk0
sync
4) The card is not yet ready for use! Since the A10 u-boot is board
specific, the image comes without any uboot install, follow the next
steps to install the right u-boot for your board
5) Remove the card, and re-insert it. The uboot partition should get
automatically mounted, if not mount it manually,
6) As root (or through sudo) run:
sh <uboot-part-mount>/select-board.sh
Note the "sh " in front is necessary because the uboot vfat partition
often gets auto-mounted noexec. ie:
sudo sh /run/media/hans/uboot/select-board.sh
If you've dialog installed the select-board.sh script will prompt for
your board. If you don't have dialog installed, it will print the list
of supported boards. Lookup your board and re-run the script with the
shortname for your board as argument, ie:
sudo sh /run/media/hans/uboot/select-board.sh mk802
7) umount the uboot and rootfs partitions, ie:
umount /run/media/hans/uboot
umount /run/media/hans/rootfs
8) Your sdcard is now ready for use
9) *Before* powering up your A10 device connect it to an hdmi or dvi
monitor
10) When first booting from the sdcard inserted Fedora will automatically
reboot once, this is part of the process to resize the root partition to
fill the entire sdcard and is normal behavior.
11) After the automatic reboot Fedora will start with the firstboot wizard:
11a) Configure a user here
11b) Most A10 devices do not come with a battery backed rtc, so you will
want to enable ntp. Simply click ok in the ntp dialog. Now
firstboot
will try to start ntp. Since most devices have only wireless, and
that is not configured yet at this time, click on cancel when it
tries to start ntp. If it then asks if you want to re-do your ntp
configuration choose no.
12) Log in as the just created user
13) If you need to configure wireless click on the network icon in the
top right corner (next to the clock) and select the wireless network
you want to connect to
14) Enjoy Fedora on your A10 device
Supported Devices:
------------------
Fedora 18 ARM for Allwinner A10 has been tested with the following devices:
* Gooseberry development board
* Mele a1000g/a2000g 1024 MB RAM
* Mini-X 1024 MB RAM
* mk802 (with female mini hdmi) 512 MB RAM
* mk802ii (with male normal hdmi) 1024 MB RAM
Fedora 18 ARM should also work on the following devices:
* Cubieboard development board 512 MB RAM
* Cubieboard development board 1024 MB RAM
* H6 netbook
* Hackberry development board
* Hyundai a7hd tablet
* Mele a1000/a2000 512 MB RAM
* Mini-X 512 MB RAM
Configuring the display output
------------------------------
Multiple video outputs at the same time are not supported. By default
hdmi output with EDID is used for all devices, except for tablets/netbooks
where the default output is the lcd.
The default hdmi output with EDID will get the native resolution of your
TV / monitor and use that. Note that in order for this to work your TV /
monitor must be connected *and turned on*, before booting your device.
The output resolution can be configured with the disp.screen0_output_mode
kernel cmdline value, which can be found in the extrargs part of
uEnv.txt in
the uboot partition. The default uEnv.txt contains the following value:
disp.screen0_output_mode=EDID:1280x720p60
This means try to use EDID and if no valid EDID info is found fallback to
1280x720p60.
The used output can be changed by adding disp.screen0_output_type=X to the
extraargs in uEnv.txt. With X being one of: 0:none; 1:lcd; 2:tv; 3:hdmi;
4:vga
Some per display type notes:
-lcd outputs: Hardcoded to the native mode, disp.screen0_output_mode is
ignored
-tv: Does not support EDID, "EDID:" must be removed from the
disp.screen0_output_mode value otherwise it will be ignored, example
usage:
disp.screen0_output_type=2 disp.screen0_output_mode=720x480i50
-hdmi: To override the EDID detected mode, drop the "EDID:" from the
disp.screen0_output_mode value and set it to the desired mode, ie:
disp.screen0_output_type=3 disp.screen0_output_mode=1360x768p60
-vga: Does not support EDID, "EDID:" must be removed from the
disp.screen0_output_mode value otherwise it will be ignored. interlaced
progressive and refreshrate settings specified are ignored, each
resolution
has hardcoded values for these. Example usage:
disp.screen0_output_type=4 disp.screen0_output_mode=1024x768
USB controller caveats
----------------------
The OTG USB controller in host mode only supports a limited number of
devices, plugging in a hub + mouse + keyboard typically will make either
the mouse or keyboard not work. This is a hardware limitation which we
will likely not be able to work around.
On tv-sticks and top-set boxes, simply avoid the otg connector, instead
use a hub in a regular host usb connector. Note on the mini-x the otg /
host
marking is not always correct. If things don't work try using the OTG
connector instead!
On tablets and the gooseberry unfortunately only the otg connector is
available. One solution there is using a single usb-device which is
both a keyboard and a mouse at the same time. IE the receiver for logitech
wireless desktop sets.
Supported hardware components / features:
-----------------------------------------
Fedora 18 ARM for Allwinner A10 supports the following components:
* CPU + PMU + RAM
* Serial ports
* MMC cards
* Internal NAND storage
* Framebuffer on lcd / vga / hdmi / composite video
* Sound both analog out and over hdmi
* OTG USB controller
* Both standard USB host controllers
* Wifi
* Wired Ethernet
* SATA
* IR (untested at this time)
Unsupported hardware components:
--------------------------------
The following components require various proprietary blobs to be used, and
as such are not supported in the Fedora images. The kernel drivers for them
are present (usually as modules), so if you add the necessary blobs you
might get these to work:
* Mali 400 GPU
* Cedar hardware video & audio decoding and encoding engine
* G2D 2d engine
Differences from stock Fedora
-----------------------------
* Since the A10 is not a very powerful soc some services which are
enabled by
default on Fedora are disabled in the image, see build-image.sh for a
list.
* No plymouth: we log to a serial console for debugging so no pretty
splash.
Also we don't use an initrd, so removing the console=ttyS0,115200 from
the extraargs in uEnv.txt will give plymouth, but so late it hardly
matters.
Future plans / todo:
--------------------
* Currently 192MiB of the A10's RAM is reserved, leaving only 320MiB for
Linux
use on 512MiB RAM systems. This is mostly caused by memory reserved
for use
by hardware listed under the "Unsupported hardware components" paragraph.
Since we're not using those blocks anyways the plan is to give this
RAM back
to Linux by adding kernel cmdline options to reserve the RAM, and then:
1) On Fedora by default set all the reserved sizes to 0 on the cmdline
2) The kernel modules for these hw-blocks will check the reserved size
and
if it is 0 refuse to load
3) Users who want to use these hw-blocks already need to manually
configure
the necessary blobs, they will now also need to adjust the kernel
cmdline
* Currently both the analog and hdmi audio outputs of the A10 are both
always registered. This means that the user must always manually pick the
right soundcard for his config. The plan is to instead only register the
analog out on boards which actually have an analog out connecter, and
only
register the hdmi audio card when an hdmi-audio capable monitor is
detected
Rebuilding the Fedora 18 ARM for Allwinner A10 disk image
---------------------------------------------------------
Building the Fedora 18 ARM for Allwinner A10 disk image consists of 2 steps
1) Building a uboot.tar.gz and rootfs.tar.gz "overlays", this is done
bu the build-boot-root-sh script
2) Combining uboot.tar.gz and rootfs.tar.gz with an official Fedora 18
ARM panda image. The a10 image you downloaded is named the same as
the panda
image used as base with panda replaced by a10, so to get the panda image
name replace a10 with panda again :) This combining is done by the
build-image.sh script
These scripts are hosted here:
https://github.com/jwrdegoede/sunxi-fedora-scripts.git
A copy of the exact versions of these scripts used to build this Fedora A10
image can be found in the scripts directory of the uboot partition, the
kernel config used during the build can be found here too.
If you want to exactly reproduce this image it is important to use the
scripts from the scripts dir of the uboot partition, as the scripts contain
GIT tags used during the build to checkout the exact versions to build.
The pre-conditions these scripts expect to be met, and the exact usage of
them is documented in comments in the top of each script.
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