I am greatly intrigued with the beagleboard. I've wasted too many man
hours wrestling with undocumented hardware. I'm done with that. The
only wrinkle I see is the SGX graphic accelerator from Imagination
Technologies. They are apparently unwilling to release the
documentation except to licensees. So...
How well does the video work with only the openly available
information and code?
How well documented is the rest of the OMAP processor? I have read the
datasheet and it doesn't mention that the 2D/3D hardware is not openly
documented. Are there other surprises?
I am greatly intrigued with the beagleboard. I've wasted too many man
hours wrestling with undocumented hardware. I'm done with that. The
only wrinkle I see is the SGX graphic accelerator from Imagination
Technologies. They are apparently unwilling to release the
documentation except to licensees. So...
How well does the video work with only the openly available
information and code?
The FFmpeg 720p demo was put together with all open source software.
Video using the DSP is pending.
How well documented is the rest of the OMAP processor?
Please find out for yourself by visiting http://www.ti.com/omap35x.
The technical reference manual is 3,446 pages today. And covers all
of the peripherals utilized on the Beagle Board today, to the best of
my knowledge.
I have read the
datasheet and it doesn't mention that the 2D/3D hardware is not openly
documented. Are there other surprises?
The DSP interface software hasn't been released to open source yet.
It is in the plan to provide them as open source, but they will be
provided as GPL in the kernel and TI proprietary licensing (partial
source) in the user space first. The DSP-side portions, namely the TI
codecs, will still be closed source.
When the 2D/3D graphics drivers are released, only the kernel portions
will be GPL. The user-space libraries will be closed source by the
current plan of record.
None of these are surprised to those who have been paying attention to
the discussions on-going here. Let me know if there is some way to
better be up-front about these things that doesn't include statements
that go further to pointlessly discourage people.
Excellent point. I do tend to forget about that. I was referring to Codec Engine and Link. I expect that some people will decide to build open source codecs and that there will be at least a couple of free codecs. Ogg Theora is under development as a Google Summer of Code project, but we had several false-starts with the tools, etc., so it might not get completed in the project time.
Denis Oliver Kropp has written a graphic driver for DirectFB using the
C64x dsp of the TI DaVinci chip under LGPL.
It might be easily adaptable for the OMAP3530,no?
I had a quick look into that and it seems to hook quite deeply into
davincifb, the 2.6.10 mvista version
I couldn't figure out what it needs to talk to the dsp (nothing,
dsplink, dspbridge, dspgw, something else) either. Still a pretty
interesting project.
Thank you for the information. It sounds like there is enough open
information to drive the video unaccelerated which will cover many of
my applications. I will exacerbate the Digikey backorder today and get
started.
