Making Pandora's Speakers Sound Better


notaz said:
After thinking about it I came up with idea of making a tested Linux VM with all the OS dependencies setup. So you basically free up 300GB or so, download a VM image, load in under kvm/virtualbox/whatever, fire up a build there and it makes you a firmware image from start to end, without user interaction (would take a couple of days but whatever). What do you think?
It'd be useful if there were some way to keep it up to date so everyone can be working from the same base. I can build the current kernel, but I don't have everything needed to actually build a complete image.

notaz said:
I'll try to make sure to merge your stuff for the next hotfix.
I need to update it for the new kernel for you, and get other changes like LED and Chris's shutdown hack in place. Need to figure out how to download the new kernel first, I guess. :p
 
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what about a qemu vm? One person could be in charge of keeping a clean qemu vm up to date while all the devs download and use, making sure they are getting the newest release... just to complete the circle, creating a google group that notifies the devs that join about new builds of the qemu vm. Also, the dev could keep a clean download of the vm separate from the working vm so whenever they needed a fresh one, just copy and run... sounds (to me) pretty efficient, but what do you guys think about that? Qemu is the lightest vm program I have seen to date, and there are more and more guis being built for it (for those who are fans of VMware or Virtualbox over qemu because they have guis)...
 
Yeah that's what I'm trying to propose. qemu VMs run under VirtualBox so even windows users could use it easily.

I just need some indication this will be used by people before starting on this.
 
I'd use it... I'd prefer something more sandboxed with the Pandora native OS vs cross-compiling... I just prefer to be as native as I can be (and if I am ever without a Pandora again, heaven forbid, I'd have a powerful fallback for porting and developing)... I'm just curious if Virtualbox (supporting qemu vms and all) would support an arm-based vm... as I don't recall VB ever really saying that they supported such an architecture, but I could be wrong.
 
Notaz, I will most definitely use it as I have suggested this many times in the past and it would be an exceptionally useful tool for firmware development. Let me know the moment you need some feedback/testing, and I will get to it. Of course, 300gigs isn't going to download to me here in Austria in a blink, but I will persist until I get the whole thing down and running. I'm on Linux and can use Virtualbox btw, or VMWare on OSX, Parallels too, and of course Qemu everywhere it runs (albeit I do not have a Windows environment..)
 
Esn said:
notaz said:
I'm in the same position as you, they don't even list me part of the team on the other forums.
This rather shocks me, to be honest.

Aaaah, damn!
This is my fault, I guess.
When we started the boards, I put the team badge on every team member registering there.
notaz joined later, as he wanted to stay on these boards primarily, and later when I joined, I totally forgot about the team badge... my bad!

Time to fix that, honestly! :eek:
 
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notaz said:
EvilDragon said:
Time to fix that, honestly! :eek:
Well if you added me then you should probably also add DJWillis and vimacs..

Heh - have never seen them post there, so I didn't think they even were registered :)
But done that. I wonder - sebt3 should probably be added as well, since he started working on the OS as well :)
 
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EvilDragon said:
But done that. I wonder - sebt3 should probably be added as well, since he started working on the OS as well :)
no thanks, havent got too far there, and I wont have much time for that in the near futur
 
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torpor said:
Ah hah, that is true that it did not appear in the ALSA (kernel) sources until 2.6.36! BUT: it can be compiled and built from the ALSA standalone sources as an external module!

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix%3AModule-aloop

(see the bit about ./configure --with-cards=aloop --with-sequencer=yes ; make ; make install)
FYI this results in:
checking for built-in ALSA... yes
configure: error: You have built-in ALSA in your kernel.

I don't really want to make ALSA as modules and replace complete ALSA driver at this point, I also doubt aloop has no dependencies on newer ALSA core, so not going to try forcing it. I think it makes much more sense to do all this in 'Y' firmware, where we get all this for free with the new kernel.
 
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This doesn't make much sense - you can't get through the configure, because you're building on a machine that has ALSA already built-in? (i.e. not a module) Very weird.

FYI, aloop doesn't have dependencies on newer ALSA core, I've used it on older kernels (external-ALSA build method, though..)

I can see where you're coming from with the Y firmware .. only thing is, isn't this years and years away? From my perspective having multi-client audio working on PandoraOS would be very lovely, but okay if you think its best to wait, fine. I can't really hack on it myself these days, alas.
 
torpor said:
This doesn't make much sense - you can't get through the configure, because you're building on a machine that has ALSA already built-in? (i.e. not a module) Very weird.
alsa-driver needs a kernel tree to compile, so I gave it pandora's kernel tree. Are you suggesting to build it against my host kernel? This results in a mess, as expected:
Code:
  CC [M]  /tmp/alsa-driver-1.0.24/acore/memory_wrapper.o
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-m64"
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-mno-red-zone"
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-mcmodel=kernel"
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-maccumulate-outgoing-args"
 
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No, I wasn't suggesting you build it against your host kernel, I just didn't understand that you've not got a kernel tree for the Pandora with ALSA as a module (*)

Never mind this, like you said, it seems like this is a job for the 'Y' firmware builders.

Maybe I can take a stab at it. Any idea how we can get a VM of a pre-built env set up, so we don't have to do all the bootstrapping just to get started? (*- btw, aren't there already 'all-modules' Pandora kernels in the tree..?)
 
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