Archives | September 2009

Finally getting caught up on a bunch of patches from various users I have been dealing with via email. Issued a PULL request tonight, which should make those people happy (as well as everyone else using the effected products) http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/misc-fixes3 On a personal note (but perhaps of interest to this crowd), I bought a new LG 42" television a couple of weeks ago. It actually runs Linux, and includes a serial port and USB port for management. I put in a request for the GPL source code last week, and the request was fulfilled today. I will be doing a diff and seeing...

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Things are ticking along nicely here at KernelLabs. The Linux Plumbers Conference 2009 took up most of last week and aside from my posting replies here in the blog threads it feels like I haven't posted here in a very long time. So what's new you ask? From my perspective I took a look at Andy Wall's HVR1850 patches over the weekend. Saturday was spent a regression testing those against the HVR1800. Aside from a minor hiccup requiring a new hardware detection patch I think the IR patches are in good shape. As always, we'll know more as the testing expands. Kudos to Andy for running with the IR project. I...

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The Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland wrapped up yesterday afternoon. Here are some highlights: KGDB Talk - a status update on kernel debugger support by Jason Wessel and Jesse Barnes. They discussed various issues with getting kgdb and kdb merged together into the upstream kernel. With the introduction of Kernel Mode Switching, you can now break into the debugger locally from within X-Windows. Welcome to what I could do with SoftIce in 1998! Audio update - discussion of various proposals related to the audio subsystem, an update on the state of PulseAudio, and other issues. The Intel...

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In preparation for the Linux Plumber Conference next week, there has been considerable discussion about Hans Verkuil's proposed Media Controller framework. If you only took a cursory read of the framework, you might wonder why you would care about any of this if you aren't building embedded systems. However, there is actually a *very* real-world capability that many people are interested in: Ever want to run tvtime without having to run sox or arecord/aplay in the background? Ever want to run mplayer without all those annoying command line arguments to specify which alsa device...

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I keep seeing people asking about support for these two devices, so I figured I should provide a status update. Just so you know, they are basically both the same piece of hardware - em28xx bridge, xc3028 tuner, and drx-d demodulator. The issue preventing it from being supported is the drx-d demod. With Michael Krufky's help, I did get the board working in the mainline kernel and am pretty satisfied with the tuning performance. The only big issue remaining is we need to write a firmware extraction script for the drx-d microcode, since we do not have the legal rights to redistribute it. Now,...

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A PULL request was issued to the linux-media mailing list tonight for the NTSC closed captioning support: http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/em28xx-vbi3 So if you have a em2880 based device such as the Haupauge HVR-950, a PCTV HD Pro 800e, ATI TV Wonder 600 USB, or any of the em2860 based devices such as the KWorld 2800d, then you now magically have closed captioning support! The raw VBI support is currently specific to NTSC, but PAL support will come soon. The work also exposed some bugs in zvbi, as well as prompted me to realize that tvtime's closed captioning support is completely...

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Until now, we've been leaving the slave tuner output and clock outputs of the TDA18271 tuner enabled at all times, even while in standby mode. This was the safest choice, as some tuners may need those features enabled while others do not. Disabling one of these outputs can cause adverse effects when done on a board that needs such features enabled. I've added a new configuration option to describe which output features are allowed to be disabled when the device enters low power standby mode. I've tested this on a number of boards, keeping the clock output enabled while disabling the slave tuner...

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We've reached the end of a major milestone. SAA7164 is ready to be merged into the master LinuxTV repositories at linuxtv.org. For cleanup and ease of merging I've extracted all of the patches from saa7164-stable and created saa7164-merge. I've asked Mauro to review and merge at his earliest convenience. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the SAA7164 project. If you've donated, tested, written to me, complained, given me words of encouragement or simply reported bugs... thank you! What's next for the SAA7164 project? Once the merge is complete we'll rebuild saa7164-stable...

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Over the course of the past year, a number of developers have expressed a need for giving the bridge drivers better control over dvb_frontend operations. Specifically, there is a need for the bridge driver to receive a DVB frontend IOCTL and have the opportunity to allow or deny the IOCTL to proceed, as resources permit. For instance, in the case of a hybrid device, only the bridge driver knows whether the analog functionality is presently being used. If the driver is currently in analog mode serving video frames, the driver will have a chance to deny the DVB frontend ioctl request before dvb-core...

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