The Yoe Distribution

Booting Yoe on the ODROID-C4

Summary

The ODRIOD-C4 is the latest addition to the line of SBCs from Hardkernel. It is priced at $50 and comes packed with high performance parts including the Amlogic S905X3 quadcore ARM64 ( cortex-a55 ) CPU, 4GB DDRR4 DRAM, 4 USB-3.0 ports, GigE, HDMI 2.0, and a 40-pin GPIO header to list a few key features.

ODROID-C4

Porting the Yoe Distribution

Since the Yoe distribution is based on OpenEmbedded, we can take advantage of the layered architecture where the Odroid board support is added via a BSP overlay layer. Therefore the effort was focused on adding necessary bits to meta-odroid.

New Cortex-a55 tune files

OpenEmbedded allows us to optimize SOC flags to squeeze the best performance out of the compiler. A new tune file to enumerate cortex-a55 specific tuning options was added:


DEFAULTTUNE ?= "cortexa55"

TUNEVALID[cortexa55] = "Enable Cortex-A55 specific processor optimizations"
TUNE_CCARGS .= "${@bb.utils.contains('TUNE_FEATURES', 'cortexa55', ' -mcpu=cortex-a55', '', d)}"

require conf/machine/include/arm/arch-armv8a.inc

# Little Endian base configs
AVAILTUNES += "cortexa55 cortexa55-crypto"
ARMPKGARCH_tune-cortexa55             = "cortexa55"
ARMPKGARCH_tune-cortexa55-crypto      = "cortexa55"
TUNE_FEATURES_tune-cortexa55          = "aarch64 cortexa55 crc"
TUNE_FEATURES_tune-cortexa55-crypto   = "aarch64 cortexa55 crc crypto"
PACKAGE_EXTRA_ARCHS_tune-cortexa55             = "${PACKAGE_EXTRA_ARCHS_tune-armv8a-crc} cortexa55"
PACKAGE_EXTRA_ARCHS_tune-cortexa55-crypto      = "${PACKAGE_EXTRA_ARCHS_tune-armv8a-crc-crypto} cortexa55 cortexa55-crypto"
BASE_LIB_tune-cortexa55               = "lib64"
BASE_LIB_tune-cortexa55-crypto        = "lib64"

A new machine configuration file to define default tuning and pin kernel/bootloader versions was created:

Machine Configuration

#@TYPE: Machine
#@NAME: odroid-c4
#@DESCRIPTION: Machine configuration for odroid-c4 systems
#@MAINTAINER: Armin Kuster <akuster808@gmail.com>

DEFAULTTUNE ?= "cortexa55-crypto"

require conf/machine/include/arm/tune-cortexa55.inc
require conf/machine/include/amlogic-meson64.inc
require conf/machine/include/odroid-arm-defaults.inc
...

Recipes for Kernel and Bootloader

While upstream support for Amlogic SOCs is found in the mainline kernel and Hardkernel added support for the C4 into 4.9, we still needed to update recipes and add support for a few of the C4 peripherals. Eventually it might be good to upstream these changes. Similarly, the recipe for u-boot 2015.01 is added since that is the officially supported bootloader from Hardkernel.

Yoe Distribution port

Yoe distribution has a setup script to do workspace setup, and a new file (which is just a symlink) to use ODROID-C4 is added as odroid-c4-hardkernel-envsetup

Building yoe-simple-image

power-on and image should boot into console

htop with Sato and Kiosk Browser

Enabling the 3.2 Inch LCD Shield

Using the 3.2 Inch LCD Shield requires enabling it in the device tree and at the same time disabling spidev to avoid conflicts – the changes are applied in the kernel via a patch.

Building yoe-simple-image with this change will enable it and /dev/fb4 should become available which is implemented in the fb_hktft32 framebuffer driver.

Kiosk Broser on the LCD Shield

The QT5 layer for openembedded includes a sample kiosk browser which uses QTWebengine. To include this in the image, add the following to conf/local.conf:

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " qt-kiosk-browser"

Bake the image again and flash it to SD card. Once booted, the kiosk browser can be launched on the LCD using the following commands:

Kiosk Browser

What Works

X11 over fbdev and the lunuxfb backends work fine. 169MiB of memory is consumed when using just the Sato UI. After launching the kiosk browser, memory consumption increases to approximately 225MiB.

Sato UI on C4

Further work