Category: IoT

Overview of aarch64 SBC support in Fedora 27

Support for ARM 64 bit (aarch64) Single Board Computers (SBCs) has been one of the most highly requested features along side the Raspberry Pi. It’s something I’ve been working towards almost as long too. Finally with Fedora 27 I felt we would have enough of the bits in place for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

You’ll note from the Fedora change linked above I was very cautious with what we planned to achieve. The change has a very focused list of images: Server, Workstation and Minimal and a limited list of devices: basically the Raspberry Pi 3, the 96boards Dragonboard 410c and HiKey, and a handful of AllWinner devices with a focus on the Pine64 series of boards. The reason for this was I knew there was going to be a lot of low level boot and kernel bits that needed focus and polish and the Fedora 27 cycle was severely limited time and resource wise so the plan was to focus on getting all the core bits into place for Fedora 27 and have a couple of well polished devices and then expand that rapidly for Fedora 28.

The key functionality we were aiming for was a well polished uEFI implementation in u-boot to enable a single install/boot path in Fedora on aarch64 using uEFI/shim/grub2 to boot Fedora on both SBCs and SBSA compliant aarch64 platforms. We now have that platform in place, primarily due to Herculean efforts of Rob Clark and Peter Jones, as well as many others who have provided insight into the deep dark details of the uEFI specification. Fedora 27 will ship with a quite heavily patched, well by Fedora’s standards anyway, u-boot 2017.09 which provides us the core of this functionality enabling us to use a vanilla upstream shim and grub2 to boot a standard Fedora. All this work is already upstream, or making it’s way there in 2017.11. In Fedora 28 there will be even more improvements that will enable us to do a bunch of other cool stuff (that’ll be a post for later!) and also enable much quicker upstream board enablement now all the core bits are in place.

So what do we actually support? Well all the usual bits that you would expect on a standard Fedora install, whether it be x86_64, ARMv7 or aarch64, like SELinux, containers, desktops and all the other bits. There’s a few bits and pieces that are a little rough around the edges but overall the feature is pretty robust. On a board by board feature set lets break the this down across the boards:

Raspberry Pi 3

The support for the Raspberry Pi3 is the equivalent to the ARMv7 support but with boot via uEFI/grub2. The memory isn’t quite as good as on 32-bit but that’s to be expected, overall it’s pretty reasonable for a device of the specs and cost. Like on 32 bit support we’re seeing regular improvements each release and throughout the releases. The aarch64 support for the RPi3 is just an evolution to this.

DragonBoard 410c

The support for the DragonBoard 410c is looking pretty decent. Qualcomm has been doing a pretty decent effort to get stuff upstream, we have firmwares for the GPU and for video decode/encode upstream as well, along with kernel drivers and the open freedreno 3D drivers, HDMI audio should work as well. The WiFi firmware isn’t yet upstream but I’ll document how/where to get that and hopefully that should be in linux-firmware soon as well. Overall I’m quite happy with the status of this device, although like all devices with 1Gb RAM it’s a little constrained, but that should make the newly announced 820c with 3Gb of RAM a decent device ;-). All the details for getting it running will soon be in the Fedora 96boards wiki page.

HiKey

Most features and functionality of the HiKey are supported, note this isn’t the HiKey960 (look to F-28 for support for that), except accelerated graphics due to the use of a MALI GPU. Other than that the functionality is pretty decent. You’ll likely want the latest tianocore firmware and the details for that can be found on the Fedora 96boards wiki page.

Pine64 (AllWinner A64 SoC)

We actually should have a number of devices based on the AllWinner A64 SoC working here but we’ve only tested the 3, 2Gb/1Gb/512Mb, Pine64 device sizes. The support for these devices is headless and you will need a serial console else you’re on your own as none of the display bits in the kernel have made it upstream, and of course the GPU is a MALI 400 series so when it does it won’t be fast. The support for the rest of the device is basic, it’s usable for a headless server style device, we support network, USB, KVM, RTC and a few other bits. Other than display we don’t yet support the SDIO attached wireless, sound, crypto offload or any of the other media interfaces. A lot of this is under review upstream so I think Fedora 28 should look much better for this series of devices and 4.15 might even bring very basic console output. Speaking of series of devices which ones should actually work other than the three Pine64 devices? Well the following A64 SoC devices have a Fedora built u-boot and kernel DT support so should work as well as the Pine64: BananaPi-m64, OrangePi Win, SoPine baseboard (PineBook boots if you’re happy with serial console), NanoPi-A64 and the A64-OLinuXino. We had some troubles with the AllWinner H5 SoC devices earlier in the cycle but I’ve had a couple of reports that it seems to be resolved so they should work too and that adds the Orange Pi PC2, Prime and Zero+ 2 as well as the NanoPi NEO2. So that’s around a dozen or so devices! 🙂

Other ARM64 SBCs

I’ve had reports that other aarch64 SBCs boot on Fedora just fine. I’ve not listed those where I can’t verify whether they boot with our uEFI enabled u-boot. Looking around on my desk I do have a number of devices that I expect us to be supporting in Fedora 28, or maybe even just enabling u-boot bits in a F-27 update.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the state of Aarch64 SBCs for Fedora 27 and what we’ve managed to achieve is such a short cycle!

Raspberry Pi improvements in Fedora 26

So since I landed support for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 just in time for Fedora 25 Beta it’s been a bit of a fun ride. The support for Raspberry Pi is mostly done in my spare time along side all the other responsibilities I have and it’s been interesting to see people’s feedback. Going into Fedora 25 I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect but the experience was going to be reasonable for newbies to get going without generally needing serial consoles and it met Fedora’s (and mine) exacting standards on free drivers. I think we achieved that quite well but I also learned a lot in the Fedora 25 cycle and what’s coming in Fedora 26 is quite a substantial jump forward.

Hardware for a good experience

So what have I learned about the first six months or so of Raspberry Pi in Fedora? Well there’s a couple of things that the user can do to ensure a decent starting experience themselves. The biggest FAQs I’ve dealt with on the various support forums are generally fixed by these three things:

  • A proper spec power supply. For the RPi2 this means at least 2 AMPs and for the RPi3 at least 2.5 AMPs. If you want to plug in USB WiFi dongle and a USB HDD you’ll likely want to add a little more! In most cases an old phone charger will not suffice.
  • A good quality Class 10 micro SD card. I generally use Samsung EVO or SanDisk Ultra cards.
  • A Raspberry Pi 2 or 3. Yes, it’s surprising how many people hope to run it on something else. SORRY (actually, I’m not!)!

What’s in Fedora 26 Final

So enough of what to do! Everyone wants to know what improvements arrived in the Fedora 26 Final with the 4.11.x kernels:

  • Pi3 WiFi: It’s been working in F-26 since Alpha and is surprisingly stable. There’s a file you need to grab to enable it. See details in the wiki here.
  • Performance: In the process of dealing with wifi I worked out one of the reasons we were seeing poor performance on the SD card. We’ve had some minor improvements in F-25 but this fix over doubles the performance for me on the SD card.
  • HDMI video: There’s been issues around certain monitors crashing the video (vc4) driver and people getting black screens during boot. While this isn’t perfect yet (ain’t hardware great!!) it’s greatly improved across numerous devices.
  • Composite video: We’ve had support for the composite video since 4.10 but I need people to help test this.
  • Sound: HDMI audio is supported, I’ve done minor testing with the one HDMI audio capable device I have. Analogue audio out isn’t upstream yet.
  • HAT support: We now have all the support needed to do overlays in the kernel/bootloader and dtc stack. I just need to test it some more, document it and work out how we can best distribute pre built overlays to ease consumption. There’s still no consensus on an Overlay Manager from upstream to auto load overlays based on EEPROM on the HATs. In a lot of cases you want to load the overlays from u-boot anyway for things like display. Look out for docs and blog posts on this soon!

What arrived with the 4.12 kernel rebase

  • Thermal support: so if the RPi runs too hot it’ll slow it down
  • More performance improvements and tweaks.

What’s coming in the 4.13 kernel rebase

  • Bluetooth support: upstream finally tracked down the issues here. It’s been a much requested features and I should have the bits in place soon!
  • More performance, stability and graphics improvements and tweaks.

What about Fedora 25?

Some of the above pieces will be coming to Fedora 25 with the 4.12 rebase. The focus of my spare time is Fedora 27 mostly now, with the above coming to F-26. Some components are a lot harder to back port without issues or a complex series of package updates to ensure smooth upgrade. The WiFi and performance improvements were the hardest as part of that change moves around the use of hardware blocks and drivers. I managed to stop both the RPi2 and RPi3 booting numerous times in testing before I properly realised the implications of the change. Getting these changes for users back into a stable release without issues is hard and time consuming to do across all the various use cases. I tried this with some fixes in 4.9 and ended up making the RPi3 very unstable. This cost me a lot of time to debug and fix and I don’t really want a repeat of that!!

Graphics device

One of the surprising side effects was the discovery of a device that is five years old is that Fedora suffered from early adopters issues. We were one of the first distributions to adopt a fully upstream open kernel and graphics stack and with that came a number of issues around monitor detection, especially older/cheaper models that aren’t 1920/1080 “Full HD” or via HDMI to VGA adapters. We’re still working through these with upstream and have improved the situation quite a bit in Fedora 26 overall but it takes time and reproducible use cases which with random hardware isn’t easy or quick! 🙁

Next up?

I’ll leave Fedora 27 features and functionality for another, this post has been sitting in my drafts folder since June so it’s time to get it out and like my development move on to Fedora 27!

Getting started with Zephyr on Fedora

So while Fedora is great for a lot of IoT use cases it can’t be used everywhere, such as on tiny micro controllers such as an ARM Cortex-M series or Intel Quark micro controllers, but that doesn’t mean that Fedora doesn’t make a fantastic developer platform for working with these devices.

I have a handful of Zephyr capable devices (BBC Micro:bit, NXP FRDM-K64F, 96Boards Carbon, TI CC3200 LaunchPad) so how can you get a build environment up and running quickly so you can start doing real development as quickly as possible.

In testing this I used a Digital Ocean cloud instance for a build host. Wherever you choose to build it make sure you have at least 2GB of RAM available as from my experience you need at least 2GB for building a Zephyr image.

From there we diverge a little from the upstream notes by installing the Fedora ARM cross compiler (only tested with ARM, not sure of state of other targets) and developer tools:

sudo dnf install git-core gcc gcc-arm-linux-gnu glibc-static libstdc++-static make dfu-util dtc python3-PyYAML

Next up we clone the upstream Zephyr git repository:

git clone https://gerrit.zephyrproject.org/r/zephyr zephyr-project

If we want to use a particular stable branch we now switch to the chosen branch. I’m using the latest stable release branch:

cd zephyr-project; git checkout v1.7-branch

Set up the cross compiler variables:

export GCCARMEMB_TOOLCHAIN_PATH="/usr"
source zephyr-env.sh
cd $ZEPHYR_BASE/samples/hello_world

Select and build our target:

make CROSS_COMPILE="/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnu-" DTC=/usr/bin/dtc BOARD=96b_carbon

If we’re developing this on our local machine we can now just directly flash the new build straight to the device. To do this we connect a micro USB cable to the USB OTG port on the Carbon and to your computer. The board should power on. Force the board into DFU mode by keeping the BOOT0 switch pressed while pressing and releasing the RST switch.

Confirm DFU can see the device:

$ sudo dfu-util -l
dfu-util 0.9

Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/

Found DFU: [0483:df11] ver=2200, devnum=8, cfg=1, intf=0, path="2-1", alt=3, name="@Device Feature/0xFFFF0000/01*004 e", serial="123456789"
Found DFU: [0483:df11] ver=2200, devnum=8, cfg=1, intf=0, path="2-1", alt=2, name="@OTP Memory /0x1FFF7800/01*512 e,01*016 e", serial="123456789"
Found DFU: [0483:df11] ver=2200, devnum=8, cfg=1, intf=0, path="2-1", alt=1, name="@Option Bytes  /0x1FFFC000/01*016 e", serial="123456789"
Found DFU: [0483:df11] ver=2200, devnum=8, cfg=1, intf=0, path="2-1", alt=0, name="@Internal Flash  /0x08000000/04*016Kg,01*064Kg,03*128Kg", serial="123456789"

Flash our build onto the device:

sudo dfu-util -d [0483:df11] -a 0 -D outdir/96b_carbon/zephyr.bin -s 0x08000000

Now connect another micro USB cable to the UART port and run a console:

sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Hit the reset button and you should see the following output:

***** BOOTING ZEPHYR OS v1.7.1 - BUILD: Jun  6 2017 14:07:24 *****
Hello World! arm

Now we have a basic development environment setup, know we can build, flash and run a release on the 96boards Carbon next time we can do something more advanced 😉

Update (2017-06-13): Minor updates to dependency installs and make command

WiFi on Raspberry Pi 3 for Fedora 26 Alpha

So I managed to land just about everything needed for the WiFi on the Raspberry Pi 3 for Fedora 26 Alpha (around 4.11 rc3). There’s one thing missing, because we can’t currently redistribute it, but it’s straight forward for the end user to do themselves once they’ve done the initial setup:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/master/brcm80211/brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt -o /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt

Or you can also do it when you’re flashing the image if you mount the root filesystem but the above is likely easier. It’s been surprisingly stable in my testing.

Before you all ask, at the moment I don’t plan on pushing this to earlier Fedora releases, as the upgrade path is not trivial. I will also soon publish more details of some of the other new features coming for the Raspberry Pi to Fedora 26 but I thought you’d all like the WiFi details now. The wiki has also been updated to reflect the status of the WiFi.

PS: No this is not an April Fool’s joke (it’s well past midday in UK).

Connect to a wireless network using command line nmcli

I use a lot of minimal installs on various ARM devices. They’re good because they’re quick to download and you can test most of the functionality of the device to ensure it’s working or to quickly test specific functionality but of course it doesn’t have a GUI to use the nice graphical tools which are useful to quickly connect to a wifi network or other things.

This where nmcli comes in handy to quickly do anything you can do with the GUI. To connect to a wireless network I do:

Check you can see the wireless NIC and that the radio is enabled (basically “Airplane” mode):

# nmcli radio
WIFI-HW  WIFI     WWAN-HW  WWAN    
enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled 
# nmcli device
DEVICE  TYPE      STATE         CONNECTION 
wlan0   wifi      disconnected  --         
eth0    ethernet  unavailable   --         
lo      loopback  unmanaged     --

Then to actually connect to a wireless AP:

# nmcli device wifi rescan
# nmcli device wifi list
# nmcli device wifi connect SSID-Name --ask

And that should be enough to get you connected. You can list the connection with nmcli connection and various other options. It’s pretty straight forward.

Getting started with MQTT using the Mosquitto broker on Fedora

MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport designed for machine-to-machine “Internet of Things” connectivity. It’s been used in all sorts of industries from home automation and Facebook Messenger mobile app to health care and remote monitoring over satellite links. Its ideal for mobile apps and IoT because of it’s small footprint, low power usage and small data packets. You can connect to a MQTT Broker over standard TCP/IP ports with or without TLS or over Web Sockets. There are many cloud based MQTT services such as OpenSensors, CloudMQTT, HiveMQ, AWS IoT or Azure IoT Hub but where is the fun in that?

There’s a few message brokers that support MQTT in Fedora including RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ (the version in Fedora is old but it would be nice if someone did update it to the latest version!) but for this I’ll be using Mosquitto as it’s small and relatively straight forward for home and demo usage.

Initial Install
I’ve tested this on a Digital Ocean Fedora 23 VM but for this I’ll be using a Beagle Bone Black with a Fedora 24 Beta minimal image but of course you can run it on any recent Fedora release on any supported device, ARM or otherwise.

After installing Fedora and getting it running on the network install and configure mosquitto:

  dnf install -y mosquitto screen
  mv /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf.example /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf
  firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=1883/tcp
  firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=1883/udp
  firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8883/tcp
  firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8883/udp
  systemctl enable mosquitto.service
  systemctl start mosquitto.service

By default the default settings are relatively straight forward, it runs under the mosquitto user, listens on all interfaces, with config options in /etc/mosquitto. In there is a well documented example config file called mosquitto.conf.example which contains all the default settings. Above we rename it to mosquitto.conf to use as a base config for us to modify. There’s details on using the Let’s Encrypt service on the mosquitto site. If you’re using it on the public internet I’d strongly suggest you configure TLS.

Testing it works
Now that we have a basic install done lets make sure it works and get a basic idea of how MQTT works. Included in the mosquitto package is a couple of client utilities useful for testing the MQTT broker pub/sub functionality. Start up a screen session and in a window run the following commands which subscribes us to the “test/topic” topic to the MQTT broker running on localhost:

  mosquitto_sub -h localhost -t "test/topic"

Now lets publish some data to that topic. In another screen tab run the following command which will publish a string of text to the topic:

  mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t "test/topic" -m "Hello World!"

You can run multiple subscribers either from the screen session or remote from a different host but remember to change the “-h localhost” to appropriate hostname/IP if you’re testing remotely.

MQTT can also use two types of wild cards when subscribing to topic names. So to be able to read all temperature sensors publishing to a root topic you could use “home/+/temp” which would provide “home/bedroom/temp” and “home/livingroom/temp”. The “+” will match one hierarchical level where as “#” stands for everything deeper so “home/garden/#” would provide all sensors from the garden. When using wild cards you’ll need to know which topic is reporting so use mosquitto_sub in verbose mode:

  mosquitto_sub -h localhost -v -t "test/#"

Quality of Service
One of the killer features of MQTT for low power IoT sensor networks is that it’s a “store and forward” protocol with a couple of options for quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Once the node has registered with the broker any time it sleeps the broker will queue messages and take care of delivering that message to the node as soon as it reconnects. This means the node can sleep as long as needed to preserve battery life and just wake up and connect when it has data to send or at a predetermined interval without ever missing a message.

There’s three things needed to support QoS: 1) The subscriber needs to be registered by ID with the broker 2) The subscriber needs to disable clean-slate behavior (the default is enabled) 3) Both the publisher and subscriber need to be using quality-of-service level one or two so the broker knows it needs to store the messages. More details on QoS levels are covered here.

Here’s a small demo to play with QoS basics. First connect a subscriber to the broker supplying an ID, disable clean slate and enabling QoS level 1:

  mosquitto_sub -h localhost -v -t "test/#" -c -q 1 -i "PotPlant"

Then send the following two messages, one each with and without QoS. You should see them both show up on the subscriber:

  mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t "test/topic" -m "foo" -q 1
  mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t "test/topic" -m "bar"

Now stop the subscriber (Ctrl+c) and while it’s stopped send both of the messages again before restarting the subscriber. When it reconnects you should just receive the “foo” message because it’s the only one specifying a QoS level.

Further Reading
There’s a lot of information about MQTT on the web. The MQTT Essentials page from HiveMQ is a good place to start for further information and Awesome-MQTT is a curated list of MQTT related stuff with everything from language bindings to gateways/plugins for integration with various projects whether they be home audio or enterprise products.

Lipstick on a Pig AKA the Raspberry Pi 3

So while waiting for local scratch kernel builds for much more interesting devices I started looking around to see if I could find details of the kernel sources for the new BCM2837 SoC that is centre stage in the Raspberry Pi 3.

The problem is I couldn’t. What I did find is the hack the Raspberry Pi Foundation uses to boot the RPi3 on github.

So there is no source code release for the new BCM2837 SoC, just a device tree file. Someone said to me “They’re violating the GPL” and before people get out their pitch forks… they’re NOT because this is the code they ship, they are meeting their obligations there.

So for the lay person (yes, I know there’s a lot of deep level tech details I’m glossing over deep ARM architecturey people!!) basically what they are doing is booting this device as a ARMv7 device, and because the code isn’t built for ARMv8 (32 or 64 bit) they really just get the speed bump of a ARMv7 device running a bit faster, and possibly some better memory speeds and other general improvements.

So what does this mean for other distributions that wish to actually to support the Raspberry Pi 3 as a aarch64 device? You currently can NOT do so!. Why? Basically it boils down to two things:

  • Source code release for the kernel: To be honest I don’t think this should be large. People with low level knowledge of ARMv7 and the BCM283x could probably hack this up
  • Firmware support: I suspect there will need to be a new firmware that supports booting this as a aarch64 device. I obviously don’t know for sure but I’m guessing the firmware will need changes to actually properly boot this as a aarch64 device. I’ve little doubt there’s a bunch of hackery going on in there!

Of the above two, if my theory is correct, the firmware is the problematic one because it relies on the Raspberry Pi Foundation to do the work. This work for something that they feel, at the moment, gives them no particular gain but only confusion about multiple OSes. They are of course correct for their use case, basically like old school enterprise where you buy a bigger server to scale vertically because your app won’t scale horizontally, but this is another kick in the guts of the Open Source community they so heavily rely on! Oh well, it’s about as much as I expected from the Raspberry Pi Foundation as after all their devices are only just now becoming usable with upstream kernels and open userspace GPU drivers…. after a mere four years.

So what does this mean for Fedora? Basically the only way we’ll be able to support it in the short, possibly medium, term is like it’s sibling the Raspberry Pi 2 as an ARMv7 device but with added shitty wifi. Really, this device isn’t a cheap aarch64 device, it’s just like lipstick on a pig! If a cheap aarch64 device is what you want one of those go and buy a PINE64.

On the plus side the work needed to support it as a ARMv7 device at the same time as it’s sibling should just be some minor u-boot and kernel device tree patches on top of what I previously documented . Note I’ve not looked closely at this as yet, I’m still waiting for mine to arrive (YAY day 3 of 1 day shipping)! Frankly I’d sooner support it this way, an aarch64 device with terrible USB2 IO and 1GB of RAM won’t provide much, if any, of a perf bump over ARMv7, and then have the Raspberry Pi Foundation spend their time working with Broadcom on fixing the wifi and enabling distribution of the wifi firmware in linux-firmware as proper opensource broadcom wifi support would have a wider impact on the Open Source community the Foundation relies upon!

Supporting Fedora 24 on the Raspberry Pi 2

So I get asked the question dozens of times a day so I thought I’d outline the answer to the question “When is Fedora going to support the Raspberry Pi 2?” and “The kernel support is upstream in the 4.5 kernel, why isn’t it enabled in Fedora 24?”

Ultimately support in the kernel is great, it’s obviously a core blocker, and the first steps to supporting a new piece of hardware in Fedora. The thing is that when people say kernel support is easy they are partially right but it’s only a very small part of what’s needed to support a complex device such has an ARMv7 Single Board Computer for the average user, especially one as popular as the Raspberry Pi! To make the device work with Fedora we could just enable the kernel bits but it doesn’t make for a good user experience OOTB (Out Of The Box).

With a lot of ARMv7 devices these days a new device comes out and it just works with Fedora. It’s awesome when I read a report, or someone tells me “I tried device X with Fedora and it just worked”. That’s because of a lot of work Fedora, and others, have done to ensure upstream boot loaders and boot process just works with new devices. It’s taken a long time to get us to this point. The Raspberry Pi is sadly not like all the other ARMv7 or aarch64 devices. It doesn’t have a standard boot process, doesn’t use u-boot or uEFI, needs vFAT partitions, firmware, text config files and other things that none of our other supported devices need. All of these differences need to be taken into account.

So in terms of the support being upstream in 4.5 the answer to that is it’s “mostly” upstream, there’s still a bunch of patches we’d need to pull in to ensure a nice OOTB experience. This isn’t a blocker in my opinion, it’s something that’s relatively straight foward with most of the bits already headed upstream into 4.6 so it’s a short term issue.

For the rest of the bits what do I consider a nice out of the box experience? This:

  • A single image to support the Raspberry Pi and all out devices (more on that below)
  • Graphics and USB support from boot to login
  • Most basic peripherals working, at a minimum USB (inc keyboard/mouse), HDMI, wired ethernet, a decent selection of wireless USB dongles, storage (MMC and USB) and preferably sound (analog, digital HDMI, mic)
  • A means of easily creating a bootable SD card from at least the Fedora command line, and probably Windows or MacOSX
  • Good documentation, FAQ etc

Single Image:
We currently produce a lot of different images for ARMv7 like Workstation, Server, Minimal and various desktops. If we had to double the amount of images we make to add vFAT that would double the work needed by QA, rel-eng and also lead to confusion by end users as to which image is needed. I have no intention of doubling anyone’s work, or adding confusion for end users, there needs to be a proper engineering solution to this problem!

Serial Console
A number of people have said to me “just enable it and tell them to use the serial console” but having been working on ARMv7 for over 6 years now I know from experience that this leads to vast amounts of confusion by end users as to why “it’s not working” and it leads to a lot of time “providing support” to end users. With a device such as the Raspberry Pi this will become an order of magnitude worse which won’t provide users a good Fedora experience, and likely drive the people who are trying to support the device a even more nuts than normal!

Basic peripheral support
I feel that network, storage, display, input and sound, although I’m still on the fence about sound, are the minimum viable supported peripherals needed for a good OOTB experience for users.

I know that initially we won’t support HATs very well, you can already copy around device tree overlays in the /sys filesystem for basic support, but upstream still hasn’t finalised what a good experience will look like in this regard. I think we can live with this. This won’t stop the use of I2C or SPI devices connected to the 40 pin header, most of these should work just fine.

Image to card creation
Closely related to the single image and basic peripheral support I think the ability to easily create an image to use is important. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to easily solve the Windows/OSX problem, although to be honest I’ve not looked at what’s out there and we might be able to extend LiveUSBCreator here.

Raspberry Pi 3
So when will we support this? Well the kernel support hasn’t been released yet, at least that I could find at the time of writing this. That being said I don’t think it’ll be a particularly evasive or large patch set, the hardware around the Cortex-A53 is the same, so it’ll be just some glue and a pinctrl driver to make all the bits work together, likely not too dissimilar to other recent SoCs that have gained ARMv8 support. This won’t land in 4.6 as the major changes are already queued to land in that, so likely 4.7 will be the earliest upstream kernel. The wireless on the other hand could be more interesting.

So basically the work needed for support of the Raspberry Pi 3, with a proper 64 bit OS 😉 , shouldn’t be too hard once the kernel bits are upstream.

Firmwares
The other issue we had was the legal ability to redistribute the “GPU boot loader firmware” thankfully that problem was resolved about a year ago, although it did take us over 2 years to do so!

The other firmware issue which will cause problems with Raspberry Pi 3 support is that the Broadcom wireless is notoriously terrible, as any Linux running Mac user will contest to, and their wireless firmware isn’t re-distributable in the standard process of being included in the upstream linux-firmware. With luck this is something that the Raspberry Pi Foundation could assist Broadcom in improving!

Summary
So we’re well on the way to adding support. Assistance in the issues above would be very welcome, whether for supporting a single image or adding support for writing images for the Pi, to help us get the bits done sooner rather than later. Feel free to reach out to me on IRC (pbrobinson on Libera.Chat) or some other means.

My ARM grab bag device list

They say the first step of coming to terms with addiction is admitting you have a problem… I have a problem with collecting ARM devices… there I said it! How big is this problem you ask? How about I list them out and let you decide!

I’ll break the list down into categories as I believe it’s big enough to do so :-/

The aarch64 set of devices currently stands at:

  • 2x Applied Mustang (different x-gene SoC revs)
  • AMD Seattle
  • 96boards HiKey (hi6220)

The ARMv7 boards list is currently:

  • Compulabs Trimslice (tegra-2)
  • Toshiba AC100 (tegra-2)
  • nVidia Jetson TK1 (tegra-124)
  • Acer Chromebook (tegra-124)
  • BeagleBoard xM (omap3)
  • Nokia n900 (omap3)
  • Nokia n950 prototype (omap3)
  • BeagleBone (am33xx)
  • BeagleBone Black (am33xx) x3
  • BeagleBone Green (am33xx)
  • PandaBoard ES Prototype (omap4)
  • PandaBoard ES B2 (omap4)
  • CubieBoard (allwinner-a10)
  • CubieTruck (allwinner-a20)
  • Banana Pi (allwinner-a20)
  • C.H.I.P. Alpha x2 (allwinner-r8)
  • Snowball (u8500)
  • Compulabs Utilite (imx6q)
  • WandBoard Quad revb (imx6q)
  • novena board (imx6q)
  • RIoTboard (imx6s)
  • UDOO Neo (imx6sx)
  • Origen (exynos-4)
  • OLPC XO 1.75 – a number of variants (mmp2) xNumerous
  • OLPC XO-4 including XO-Touch (mmp3) xNumerous
  • Linksys WRT1900AC (armada-xp)
  • Mirabox (armada-370)
  • ifc6410 (qcom)
  • Parallella Board (zynq7000)
  • Raspberry Pi 2 x3

The Cortex-M series for IoT sensors is currently:

  • TI SensorTag 2015
  • ARM mBed IoT starter kit
  • BeeWi SmartClim

Other random related bits:

  • BeagleBone Breadboard Prototyping Cape x2
  • BeagleBone CryptoCape
  • Original 256Mb Raspberry Pi model B
  • Grove starter kit for BeagleBone Green
  • Explorer HAT
  • PiGlo HAT
  • TI CC2531 802.15.4 USB dongle x3
  • numerous random sensors

So the list above is the devices that I use for hacking on. I count 41 without listing out the dozen or so ARM based XOs I have (various prototypes and models). I also don’t have in that list phones, tablets and two drones as I don’t really hack on those as it’s not like with the list above I don’t already have enough toys! So do I have a problem?

Playing with Bluetooth Smart devices on Fedora

So I have a few Bluetooth Smart (AKA BT Low Energy or BT-LE) devices including a BeeWi SmartClim Smart Temperature & Humidity Sensor, a TI SensorTag2 and a Runtasic Orbit activity tracker. I thought I’d see if I could connect to them with something other than their proprietary apps that run on my phone and get anything useful out of them.

To do this I installed a Fedora 23 minimal image on a micro SD card for BeagleBone Black, inserted a CSR USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle and powered it up. Once I’d completed the first boot wizard and logged in I installed the bluetooth command line utility packages with a “sudo dnf install -y bluez bluez-libs”. You don’t need to use a BeagleBone, you can use any ARM device or even a standard laptop which supports Bluetooth 4+ with BT-LE support.

Now that we have a device running we’re ready to start to play.

First lets see if our system sees our bluetooth dongle:

$ sudo hcitool dev
Devices:
	hci0	AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:33

Then lets scan for any Bluetooth Smart devices that are in range:

$ sudo hcitool lescan 
LE Scan ...
A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 (unknown)
A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 CC2650 SensorTag
A9:B8:C7:D6:E5:F4 (unknown)
A9:B8:C7:D6:E5:F4 BeeWi SmartClim

Now create a connection to the device we discovered:

$ sudo hcitool lecc A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6
Connection handle 3586

In the bluez package gatttool is a tool we can use to interact with Bluetooth Smart devices. We can use gatttool in interactive mode to send commands to out previously scanned device address:

sudo gatttool -b A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 -I
[78:A5:04:5B:7D:9A][LE]>

Now we connect to the deivce (note in older version of gattool the prefix would change from “[ ]” to “[CON]” now it changes the colour of the BT MAC):

[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]> connect
Attempting to connect to A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6
Connection successful
[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]>

We can request the device characteristics:

[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]> characteristics
handle: 0x0002, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0003, uuid: 00002a00-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0004, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0005, uuid: 00002a01-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0006, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0007, uuid: 00002a04-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0009, char properties: 0x20, char value handle: 0x000a, uuid: 00002a05-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x000d, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x000e, uuid: 00002a23-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x000f, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0010, uuid: 00002a24-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0011, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0012, uuid: 00002a25-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0013, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0014, uuid: 00002a26-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0015, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0016, uuid: 00002a27-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0017, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0018, uuid: 00002a28-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0019, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x001a, uuid: 00002a29-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x001b, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x001c, uuid: 00002a2a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x001d, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x001e, uuid: 00002a50-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0020, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0021, uuid: f000aa01-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0023, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0024, uuid: f000aa02-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0025, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0026, uuid: f000aa03-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0028, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0029, uuid: f000aa21-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x002b, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x002c, uuid: f000aa22-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x002d, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x002e, uuid: f000aa23-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0030, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0031, uuid: f000aa41-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0033, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0034, uuid: f000aa42-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0035, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0036, uuid: f000aa44-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0038, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0039, uuid: f000aa81-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x003b, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x003c, uuid: f000aa82-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x003d, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x003e, uuid: f000aa83-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0040, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0041, uuid: f000aa71-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0043, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0044, uuid: f000aa72-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0045, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0046, uuid: f000aa73-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0048, char properties: 0x10, char value handle: 0x0049, uuid: 0000ffe1-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x004d, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x004e, uuid: f000aa65-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x004f, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0050, uuid: f000aa66-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0052, char properties: 0x1a, char value handle: 0x0053, uuid: f000ac01-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0055, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0056, uuid: f000ac02-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0057, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0058, uuid: f000ac03-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x005a, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x005b, uuid: f000ccc1-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x005d, char properties: 0x08, char value handle: 0x005e, uuid: f000ccc2-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x005f, char properties: 0x08, char value handle: 0x0060, uuid: f000ccc3-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0062, char properties: 0x1c, char value handle: 0x0063, uuid: f000ffc1-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0066, char properties: 0x1c, char value handle: 0x0067, uuid: f000ffc2-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]>

Request the name of the device by querying the appropriate characteristic by hhandle:

[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]> char-read-hnd 0x3
Characteristic value/descriptor: 53 65 6e 73 6f 72 54 61 67 20 32 2e 30 
[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]>

The response is returned as a hexadecimal string. To make it readable we need to convert it to ASCII with some simple python:

 python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Sep  8 2015, 17:20:17) 
[GCC 5.1.1 20150618 (Red Hat 5.1.1-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> "53656e736f7254616720322e30".decode("hex")
'SensorTag 2.0'
>>>

So that’s the basics of playing with Bluetooth Smart on the command line. I want to work out all of the characteristics and write a simple python daemon to poll the device and then write the output to different locations depending on the config like to a text file or to a MQTT message bus.