Tag: Graphics

Librem 5 progress report #14

There has been some exciting work done on the Librem 5 project and while there is still plenty of work left, we would like to highlight the accomplishments the team has achieved over the last couple of weeks. So here please enjoy a brief update on our recent efforts and victories.

Software Work

There is so much that goes into the software stack of the Librem 5. There’s the underlying infrastructure like the UI shell and newly developed libraries and protocols. But then there’s the familiar apps that are necessary.

On the nuts and bolts level, our phone shell (phosh) has seen several usability improvements mostly around the lockscreen. One important change is that the lockscreen unlocking has been switched to PAM to better handle the PIN to lock the device. There have also been some additions to the code to better handle multiple outputs (screens). Also, Libhandy is our “handy” UI library for developing GTK+ apps. There has been a recent addition of an arrows widget (HdyArrows) to indicate swiping direction which will be very useful to many applications, especially the lockscreen. Additionally, libhandy has seen some bug fixes and a slight rework of the keyboard handling support. Since graphics are important, we have added Etnaviv support to weston-simple-dmabuf (a Wayland client to test Linux DMA-BUF protocol implementations). We also extended it’s NV12 format support. It’s being used over here to test wlroot’s linux-dmabuf implementation which we wrote a couple of weeks ago. We’d like to especially thank the wlroots and Weston projects for their code reviews, recommendations, and support.

Since you can’t have a phone that doesn’t make phone calls, there have been great strides made on the Calls app and the Calls app can successfully place phone calls now! (And if you missed it, we encourage you to go read the exciting blog post about it.) Along with all of the great work it took to get to this point, the interfaces have been documented in the code. Debian packaging is being put together and we’ve been working to include Flatpak packaging contributed by a member of the community.

Every smart phone needs an On-Screen Keyboard (OSK), so there has been significant development on writing some necessary protocols and getting them upstream. So far the virtual-keyboard protocol has been accepted for inclusion in upstream wlroots. The text-input protocol has also been submitted upstream. To test virtual-keyboard protocol, we created a prototype client based on weston-keyboard. You can read more about the OSK developments in Dorota’s initial blog post on the matter.

Hardware Work

Identifying and testing the individual hardware components that will be present on the dev kit and eventual phone is a non-trivial task. After identifying a component as a potential fit for our needs and receiving a couple of them to test, often kernel modules need to be modified or written before the testing can begin. This was the case when evaluating and testing a low power WiFi card/module, which is still underway. Vibration motors are also being gathered for evaluation and battery chargers are being tested. We are also looking into various camera options.

Community Outreach

The community continues to be at the front of our thoughts. So we have created a general PureOS wiki at wiki.puri.sm that still doesn’t have much details yet but will eventually be a place to look for both general and technical information on PureOS and Purism products. We’ve also fixed an issue with the community email lists so that they are functional now and opened up our Matrix rooms so that you can join our discussions with your already existing Matrix ID. For more information on both the email lists and Matrix rooms, have a look at our volunteer page.

We have been so happy to receive some initial volunteers that are doing fantastic work to help the Librem 5 become awesome. If you’ve been following and contributing to our code repositories, please note that we just moved the hosting from Gogs to GitLab – the new location can be found at source.puri.sm.

That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for more exciting updates to come!

Initial Plasma Mobile enablement on Librem 5 i.MX 6 test boards

As many of you know, the Librem 5 phone will work with two options for your desktop environment, a GNOME based phone shell and Plasma Mobile. Working closely with the KDE community, we were able to install, run, and even see mobile network provider service on Plasma Mobile! The purpose of this article is to show the progress that has been made with Plasma Mobile on the current Librem 5 development board. Here, the setup steps and overcome challenges are highlighted.

The Setup

The i.MX 6 board started off running PureOS (which, as you may know, is based on Debian testing) with a running Weston environment. Several KDE and Qt packages were needed for the Plasma Mobile environment and a few packages were not available within PureOS so needed to be built: plasma-phone-components, kpeople-vcard, and plasma-settings. For a complete list of technical steps on how Plasma Mobile was setup on the dev board, see https://developer.puri.sm/PlasmaMobile.html.

Once all of the necessary pieces were in place, running Plasma Mobile was as simple as a single command:

$ kwin_wayland --drm plasma-phone

Overcome Challenge #1: The Evil Display Issue

That is when we discovered that the desktop just wasn’t rendering properly. The prototype phone screen looked like an old TV in-between channels. Also sometimes a KDE wallet pop-up window would appear as well (seen in the picture below).

So troubleshooting hats were donned and gdb dusted off. It was discovered that if the export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland line is commented out of the plasma-phone script, then our display issue went away! But the QT_QPA_PLATFORM variable is needed to set the platform to be Wayland. So then the question became, “why is the graphics driver, etnaviv, not working in Wayland mode?”

It turns out that the missing piece was that the zwp_linux_dmabuf protocol was not yet supported in Plasma. For more information on why zwp_linux_dmabuf is needed for Etnaviv driver, check out this announcement.

There already was an upstream bug report tracking the issue, with patches to kwin and kwayland. Thanks to Fredrik Höglund for his work done on zwp_linux_dmabuf.

We incorporated upstream’s patches into our development build of kwin and kwayland and voilà! We were now able to export the QT_QPA_PLATFORM variable and see a beautiful Plasma display!

Overcome Challenge #2: The Invisible Mouse

It was obvious that the keyboard worked, because it was possible to type the password to log back in from the blue lock screen. The mouse, however, seemed to be nowhere in sight. However, by moving the mouse around (assuming it’s there and just not visible) and clicking, we saw that it was possible to open applications but only by accidentally clicking the right thing.

The issue here is that if the DRM driver doesn’t provide the cursor plane. There is an outstanding bug report on this issue.

In the meantime however, we can work around this by holding Ctrl+Super keys to draw a rotating circle around the mouse cursor position, as you can see in the video below:

This is good enough for our current needs, since ultimately we will receive the missing touch adapter hardware for the dev screen and we would no longer need to use of a traditional mouse pointer.

Overcome Challenge #3: Mobile Network Provider Service

Naturally, the next challenge we attempted was to make a phone call. First, the SIM card needs to be recognized, and the provider information retrieved from the modem. This required additional packages, some of which needed to be built from source. To actually get the Sierra Wireless MC7455 to recognize the SIM card, a PIN needed to be sent, modem brought online, and antennas attached. Then, when Plasma Mobile started, we were able to see the mobile network provider signal strength in the top left corner!

Due to the modem we currently have installed on our i.MX 6 board, phone calls are not supported so we could not fully test that part yet. But don’t worry, the Librem 5 will have a modem capable of actually placing phone calls 😉

One step closer and 9,000 kilometers across

Together with the community, Purism is making progress on the road to supporting Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5. There is still more effort needed and this collaboration with the Plasma community will be working towards the successful deployment of Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5.

From 27th of February to 1st of March, Todd and Nicole visited the Embedded World electronics supplier trade show in Nürnberg (Germany) to meet with potential parts suppliers, especially with representatives from NXP and distributor EBV Elektronik. Furthermore, we had productive meetings with suppliers for WiFi, BlueTooth, and sensors, and also talked to a number of board makers and designers.

This visit and the talks prepared us well for our next trip, this time to Shenzhen, the silicon delta of China. We have made appointments with a number of suppliers that are interested in cooperating with us on the Librem 5 phone project as well as on other hardware projects. We will have an extensive two week meeting marathon in order to narrow down the choice and pinpoint the best suppliers for our project.

Librem 5 puzzle pieces starting to come together—graphics, adaptive applications, docs and SDK

The Librem 5 is a big project. And like a lot of big projects, as you probably know, it can appear overwhelming, until you can break the parts down into logical steps. Like a large puzzle scattered on a table, our team has been organizing and beginning to assemble all the pieces. This is very exciting to progress through the initial daunting scope, accepting the tasks, start working and then… after some time, solutions emerge and almost magically align.

In our previous blog posts we described what we were starting to work on, and these efforts began to prove themselves out significantly during our week-long hackfest where part of our software phone team gathered last week in Siegen, Germany. Read more

Librem 5 Phone Progress Report

The Librem 5 and recent industry news

Lately, news headlines have been packed with discussions about critical CPU bugs which are not only found in Intel CPUs, but also partially in AMD CPUs and some ARM cores. At the same time, some of our backers have voiced concerns about the future of NXP in light of a potential acquisition by Qualcomm. Therefore you might be wondering, “Will the Librem 5 be affected by these bugs too?” and “will the Purism team get the i.MX 8 chips as planned?”, so let’s address those questions now.

Not affected by Spectre/Meltdown

At the moment we are pretty confident that we will be using one of NXP’s new i.MX 8 family of CPUs/SOCs for the Librem 5 phone. More specifically we are looking at the i.MX 8M which features four ARM Cortex A53 cores. According to ARM, these cores are not affected by the issues now known as Spectre or Meltdown, which ARM’s announcement summarizes in their security update bulletin.

So for the moment we are pretty sure that the Librem 5 phone will not be affected, however we will continue to keep an eye on the situation since more information about these bugs is surfacing regularly. In this respect we can also happily report that we have a new consultant assisting our team in security questions concerning hardware-aided security as well as questions like “is the phone’s CPU affected by Spectre/Meltdown or not”.

Qualcomm possibly buying NXP: not a concern

For quite some time there have been rumors that Qualcomm might have an interest in acquiring NXP. Since we will be using an NXP chip as the main CPU, specifically one of the i.MX 8 family, we are well aware of this development and are watching it closely.

Qualcomm is an industry leader for high volume consumer electronics whereas NXP targets lower volume industrial customers. This results in pretty different approaches concerning support, especially for free software. Where NXP traditionally is pretty open with specifications, Qualcomm is rather hard to get information from. This is very well reflected by the Linux kernel support for the respective chips. The question is how would it affect continued free software support and availability of information on NXP SOCs if Qualcomm acquires NXP?

First, it is unlikely that this deal will happen at all. Qualcomm had a pretty bad financial year in 2017 so they might not be in the financial position to buy another company. Second, there is a rumor that Broadcom might acquire Qualcomm first. Third, international monopoly control organizations are still investigating if they can allow such a merger at all. Just a few days ago the EU monopoly control agreed to allow the merge but with substantial constraints, for example Qualcomm would have to license several patents free of charge, etc. Finally, there are industry obligations that NXP cannot drop easily: the way NXP works with small and medium sized customers is a cornerstone of many products and customers; changing this would severely hamper all of those businesses involved, and these changes might cause bad reputation, bad marketing and loss of market share.

So all in all, this merger is not really likely to happen soon and there would probably not be changes for existing products like the i.MX 8 family. If the merger happens it might affect future/unreleased products.

Development outreach

In addition to working on obtaining i.MX6QuadPlus development boards to be able to work properly, the phone team is also intensively researching and evaluating software that we will base our development efforts on during the next few months. We are well aware of the huge amount of work ahead of us and the great responsibility that we have committed to. As part of this research, we reached out to the GNOME human interface design team with whom we began discussions on design as well as implementation. For example, we started to implement a proof of concept widget that would make it much easier to adapt existing desktop applications to a phone or even other style of user interface. What we would like to achieve is a convergence of devices so that a single application can adapt to the user interface it is currently being used with. This is still a long way ahead of us, but we are working on it now. We will meet up also with some GNOME team members at FOSDEM to discuss possible development and design goals as well as collaboration possibilities.

The mobile development work for KDE/Plasma will primarily be performed by their own human interface teams. Purism will be supporting their efforts through supplying hardware and documentation about our phone development progress as it is happening. This will help ensure that that KDE/Plasma will function properly on the Librem 5 right from the factory. To understand better where we’re headed with GNOME and KDE together, take a look at this blog post.

We also reviewed and evaluated compositing managers and desktop shells that we could use for a phone UI. We aim to use only Wayland, trying to get rid of as much X11 legacy as we possibly can, for performance issues and for better security. From our discussions with GNOME maintainers of existing compositors and shells, we may be better off igniting a new compositor (upstreamed and backed by GNOME) in order to avoid the X11 baggage.

On the application and middleware side of things, we have generated an impressive list of applications we could start to modify for the phone to reach the campaign goals and we have further narrowed down middleware stacks. We are still evaluating so I do not want to go into too much detail here, in order not set any expectation. We will of course talk about this in more detail in some later blog posts.

Meeting with Chip Makers

As the CPU choice is pretty clear lately, we are going to have a meeting with NXP and some other chip makers at Embedded World in Nürnberg, Germany, at the end of the month. This is very encouraging since we worked for months on getting a direct contact to NXP, which we now finally have and who we will meet in person at the conference. The search for design and manufacturing partners is taking longer than expected though. Our own hardware engineering team together with the software team, especially our low level and kernel engineers, started to create a hardware BOM (bill of material) and also a “floor plan” for a potential PCB (printed circuit board) layout, but it turns out that many manufacturers are reluctant to work with the i.MX 8M since it is a new CPU/SOC. We have, however, some promising leads and good contacts so we will work on that.

Purism Librem 5 team members attending FOSDEM

By the way, many Purism staff members will be at FOSDEM this week-end, on the 3rd and 4th of February. In addition to the design and marketing team, PureOS and Librem 5 team members will be there and we would love to get in touch with you! Purism representatives dedicated to answering your questions will be wearing this polo shirt so you can easily recognize them:

Initial Touch and Web Browsing experiments on Librem 5 prototyping boards

When it comes to prototyping the Librem 5, we are working hard and making progress on several sides. As you have seen in yesterday’s testing update blog post, we are working on development hardware in order to start getting software development groundwork done. Today, I’m sharing the results of a quick experiment with web and touch on a prototype board. Read more

The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress Towards i.MX 8

The Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign is still cranking along nicely, while it is going on we wanted to provide a progress report on the hardware selection as well as the advancements with our existing development boards.

TL;DR:

  • The base hardware with i.MX 6 is demonstrably working.
  • i.MX 8M, Etnaviv, full HD, are the likely hardware combination candidates for the Librem 5 phone.

Development Hardware Proving Positive

Showing photos of low-level progress is always a challenge, however showing Wayland and applications running on development hardware by definition means that the lower level parts are working! Booting from microSD into a Debian GNU/Linux unstable with most of the UI installed…

Purism Librem 5 phone (early development boards) for testing CPU/GPU and GNU/Linux
Purism Librem 5 (early development boards) booting the Linux kernel, Wayland, and a terminal in early August 2017.
Purism Librem 5 (early development boards) booting Debian GNU/Linux unstable, Wayland, and GNOME Settings in September 2017
Purism Librem 5 (early development boards) screenshot of a photo rendered

What led us to choose i.MX 6/i.MX 8

We have tested nearly every combination of CPU (and GPU, see further below), Purism’s goals of creating hardware that is ethical, runs free software, can separate baseband from main CPU, and the ability to run GNU/Linux (not Android), quickly narrowed our scope to i.MX 6 as one of the only viable options.

We have been testing and working with i.MX 6 and are pleased to report healthy progress with that hardware, as you can see from the photos, we have the Linux kernel booting, Wayland running, and in these photos GNOME/GTK and even Gnome Settings showing.

Purism Librem 5 (early development boards) running Debian GNU/Linux unstable, wayland, and GNOME Settings screenshot

Heading towards i.MX 8

We have been making some progress that makes us confident to say we will likely be able to use i.MX 8 for the Librem 5 phone hardware, primarily because:

  1. We will be able to evaluate a i.MX 8M pre-production board November 2017
  2. Our extended community can evaluate a handful of i.MX 8M sample chips in November 2017
  3. More evaluation boards should be available before year-end 2017
  4. In Q1 of 2018 we can get i.MX 8M into production. This is well ahead of our required hardware selection date of April 2018, so we will very likely be using the i.MX 8M in the Librem 5.
i.MX 8M (early evaluation boards)

State of the GPUs… or “Why we chose i.MX 6/8 + Vivante”

GPU drivers have been a big issue for a long time in the free software world. Manufacturers would typically not release any specification or documentation but only binary-only drivers. For PC hardware this problem has somewhat been resolved, which is why Purism uses Intel GPUs on our Librem products, since Intel has free drivers merged in mainline Linux kernel. But for ARM SOCs, the situation is not ideal.

  • MALI: One of the biggest players in the ARM field is MALI. The MALI core was originally developed by Falanx Microsystems until ARM bought their patents and copyrights and is now licensing the MALI core for ARM designs. ARM is not releasing any specs about the MALI GPU cores and does not provide any free software drivers for them. (The MALI400 is e.g. also used in the Allwinner A64 chip which again is used on Pine64 and in the Pinebook). There is an effort to develop a free driver by reverse engineering existing code, which is called LIMA, but its functionality and support is still limited.
  • Adreno: another big one is the Adreno GPU core, found in many Qualcomm Snapdragon SOCs. For this one also, no documentation exists although a reverse engineering project produced a pretty well working driver, called freedreno, which is also supported by current Mesa versions.
  • PowerVR: the PowerVR GPU cores are found mostly in embedded PowerPCs and Texas Instruments “OMAP” CPUs. As of today, we are not aware of any free development for these, only some binary-only drivers are available. There is an effort started by the Free Software Foundation but it seems that the project has stalled for some time now.
  • Tegra: the first generation nVIDIA “Tegra” SOCs has Linux kernel mainline support since 2012. The latest Tegra SOCs use the same GPU building blocks as the desktop PC graphics cards and can be used with the Nouveau GPU driver.
  • i.MX 6 Vivante: since Linux kernel 4.8, a new set of DRM/GPU drivers has been incorporated into the mainline Linux kernel, the so-called Etnaviv. Etnaviv support is also included in Mesa, starting with Mesa 17. We have successfully been operating a prototype for our phone using a mainline Linux kernel 4.12.4 with Etnaviv support. From microSD we booted into a Debian GNU/Linux unstable with most of the UI stuff installed. It works! We can safely say that upstream OpenGL hardware GPU support for i.MX 6 has landed in major Linux distributions, which is great news since hardware GUI acceleration is badly needed for any type of modern mobile GUI.

With the Librem 5, we are very excited to be advancing the mobile phone space to be ethical, respect digital rights, run GNU/Linux, be secure, and create a future that we are proud to be part of. We will be posting regular development updates as we progress with the hardware, software, and partners.

Make your own Librem 5 concept art.


A few days ago, a very talented Librem 5 enthusiast asked me for some HD material to create his own Librem 5 concept art, so I have put together a couple of blank renders of the handset, along with the logos in SVG format.

All this design is currently a work in progress and I believe in collaborative efforts. I believe in the people’s power. I believe in the fact that we don’t own Creativity. We just own the pleasure of expressing it. I see Creativity as a global positive energy that vibrates and grows through all of us. We should never restrict its freedom of movement. Freely collaborating and sharing with the world is the essence of the Free Software movement and is what Purism is made of.

In that regard I thought I would make those files public for anyone to freely join the fun.
So, if you feel like expressing your artistic skills and your vision of what could be a smartphone that is made for user’s respect and software freedom, feel free to do so!

Download the Librem 5 Concept Pack

Enjoy! 🙂