EMGD install process for Timesys Fedora 14

[DDard1]

I have successfully installed EMGD on Timesys Fedora 14 using the CED in windows method. I am a linux novice and really don't understand why all of the steps in the install instructions (7.3.3 in the user's guide) are neccessary. Can comeone please explain this? It seems to me if Timesys is Intels spin on Fedora to officially support EMGD drivers - why do we need to recompile the kernel headers and the drivers? What specifically does the install process do? Why can't we just copy the xorg.conf file and use it with the EMGD driver "as is" in Timesys?

[Kirk_B_Intel]

Timesys is not an Intel distibution, it is just one we have directly supported with the driver. It does not have the special DRM changes we need for the graphics driver to operate built in "out of the box". The EMGD graphics driver is not open source due to some third party "stuff" (I.P.) in the code that prevents us from being able to open source it. As such our tweaks to the kernel are not acceptable to the Linux Community to be "up streamed". We therefore need to have people get a distro that we support, and tweak it so we can operate with ALL our features we need for best performance. THAT code IS Open Source and the source is included with the driver release if you wish to look or use it.

It is not an ideal solution but generally our OEMS just need to do it once then build their platforms with the modified distro.

There is hope this situation will improve in the future (as it has improved over time- our old install process REALLY was horrible but it has gotten much simpler - relatively speaking).

Hope this helps.

Kirk

[DDard1]

that was very helpful thank you!

[DDard1]

So now another question comes to mind. Are Timesys and Meego the only supported distros for EMGD because they are the only ones tested by Intel? In other words, is there something special about Timesys/Meego, or is Intel just limiting the number of platforms they must test?

I know the Timesys spin is made to support the US15W / EG20T. Is this really much different from what I would get with a stock Fedora distro though?

My real questions boils down to what distro should I use.I have a Kontron nanoETXexpress-TT board. Kontron offers a Fedora 14 board support package with patches and drivers. When I went through the EMGD documentation I saw that Timesys and Meego are the only supported distros for EMGD, so I thought we must use those.

However, after installing Timesys and running updates, we are now getting kernel panics related to the initilization of the pch_uart driver. This is making me rethink my simple decision to use Timesys because "Intel said so".

[Kirk_B_Intel]

We only officially support the distros we test (and that is limited just because there is so much churn in the Linux distros and so many distros) however the driver can work with just about any distro as long as:

1. The kernel has not been changed so radically in the DRM area that we just cannot get through to the hardware without specifically supporting the kernel changes,

2. AND, the X version matches a supported library build version for the X libraries we provide.

It is usually the Xorg/X Server version that is the problem with differnt distros. If the driver loads with your X, it will work- but if you get a mismatch error, then it is game over unless you can downrev (or uprev) to the supported X (and that can be problematic).

We just cannot support everything as it is not finacially feasible (the driver is FREE). In the future if we are allowed to distribute source, it will make things much easier to compile the libraries to a different X version.

[alo7]

Hi Kirk,

What is the X version supported by EMGD v1.8 ?

Thx.

Cheers,

Albert

[Kirk_B_Intel]

For Fedora the Xserver version is 1.9. MeeGo 1.2 supports the same.