[Librem-5-dev] Kernel and ATF update for devkits

[Andy Green]

On 10/31/19 2:33 PM, Guido Günther via Librem-5-dev wrote:
> Hi,
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 08:21:11AM -0700, Angus Ainslie via Librem-5-dev wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> We've had to introduce an ATF ( ARM Trusted firmware ) update in
>> preparation for some devfreq work in the kernel. This is also the
...
>> A heads up that there will be a lockstep kernel and mesa upgrade that
>> will be coming down soon to backport softpin to the 5.3 kernel.
> 
> mesa 19.2-rc4 is now available in the ci archives and this requires the
> above kernel/uboot upgrade. Note that updating the kernel to 5.3 first
> (and then mesa) is fine since the current kernels supports both user
> space interfaces to cope with mesa 18.3 and 19.2.
> 
> We'll drop the support for the older mesa interface in 5.4. This should
> hopefully be the only incompatible user space abi change on the mesa
> side since we're now using what's in the upstream kernel and upstream
> mesa:

I tried an Oct 30 dev kit image (not sure if that has the pieces 
mentioned above) and it seems to have improved quite a bit from the last 
one I looked at... Wifi was up even at 5GHz, WPA passphrase settings 
were correctly sticky and it came back up on reboot, the browser did not 
crash, although it got a juddery scrolling thing after a while.  I 
turned off "smooth scrolling" in the browser and it seemed to be able to 
follow scrolling on the touchscreen a bit better. It was only going to 
char my hand a bit if I touched the heatsink instead of setting my arm 
on fire.  Considering this is on a FOSS GPU stack, it's impressive.

With basic operation much better the next set of annoyances are all up a 
level from last time.  It couldn't play any youtube videos, there was no 
obvious way to play audio (maybe these just need extra things installed) 
the audio volume buttons didn't give any UI (while I know gnome can do 
it), the adblock in the browser didn't seem effective; AFAIK there's no 
way to use addons like uBlock Origin.  Otherwise stuff was basically 
wanting to work.

Anyway, it's definitely all going in a good direction, nice work!

-Andy