i.MX6 Linux kernel 3.0.35-4.0.0

Freescale released a new kernel and userspace libraries for i.MX6 Q/D/DL/S a couple of weeks ago, and we've tested it on all of our boards.

For the impatient

You can grab the kernel from the boundary-imx_3.0.35_4.0.0 branch on Github and compile it in the normal way. This code base includes support for all of our unless we've discussed your custom board separately.

We've also tested all of our hardware accessories and a limited set of PCIe devices and it's ready for integration with various userspaces.

The details (from Boundary Devices)

From our side, this is a pretty straightforward merge of our boundary-imx_3.0.35_1.1.1 branch, although we did clean up a few things:

• In prior releases, we added support for our displays and Nitrogen6X boards inside of the SABRE Lite board file. In this release, we moved our code into board-mx6_nitrogen6x.c. We're carrying far more patches than we expect from Freescale, and this makes integration easier going forward.
• We discarded our thermal management patches, because Freescale has now included much of the same functionality. We'll publish some of our notes in a separate post when time permits.

The highlights (from Freescale)

Refer to the the release notes in the Freescale documentation package and the commit history for the details, but the following are some of the major features of this release:

• Vivante GPU frequency scaling support.
• Fixes for VPU release.
• The Freescale BSP contains support for Wayland.

Compatibility

From our testing and review of the patches, it appears that this kernel is ABI-compatible with the previous (1.1.1) releases except for the GPU libraries.

That said, we recommend that this be used with updated versions of the Freescale gstreamer plugins (3.0.7 is included in the Freescale release).

If you're not using either the GPU or VPU acceleration libraries, this release should be a drop-in replacement.

Let us know if you have any trouble. We believe this release to be very solid, and will be focusing our future efforts on this release for non-Android use.

Stay tuned. We'll upload some binary images this week.