contribution – Page 6

New training materials: boot time reduction workshop

We are happy to release new training materials that we have developed in 2013 with funding from Atmel Corporation.

The materials correspond to a 1-day embedded Linux boot time reduction workshop. In addition to boot time reduction theory, consolidating some of our experience from our embedded Linux boot time reduction projects, the workshop allows participants to practice with the most common techniques. This is done on SAMA5D3x Evaluation Kits from Atmel.

The system to optimize is a video demo from Atmel. We reduce the time to start a GStreamer based video player. During the practical labs, you will practice with techniques to:

Measure the various steps of the boot process
Analyze time spent starting system services, using bootchartd
Simplify your init scripts
Trace application startup with strace
Find kernel functions taking the most time during the boot process
Reduce kernel size and boot time
Replace U-Boot by the Barebox bootloader, and save a lot of time
thanks to the activation of the data cache.

As usual, our training materials are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This essentially means that you are free to download, distribute and even modify them, provided you mention us as the original authors and that you share these documents under the same conditions.

Special thanks to Atmel for allowing us to share these new materials under this license!

Here are the documents at last:

The first public session of this workshop will be announced in the next weeks.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested in organizing a session on your site.

Linux init failures now easier to debug

If you are an embedded Linux developer too, you have probably been frustrated by the lack of information from the Linux kernel when it failed to start the init process when you’re building a new root filesystem. The only thing you get is No init found, and this could hide many different causes:

No init program candidate found at all
Some init program candidates exist but they can’t be executed, for multiple possible causes (missing execute permissions, failed to load shared libraries, executable compiled for an unknown architecture…)

The good news is that this source of frustration will be gone in Linux 3.13. Thanks to a Bootlin commit merged on Nov. 13, 2013, whenever an attempt to execute an init program candidate fails, there is a message in the console detailing the executable path and the error code. For example:

Starting init: /sbin/init exists but couldn't execute it (error -13)

When you get such a message, all you have to do is lookup the error code in include/uapi/asm-generic/errno-base.h or maybe in uapi/asm-generic/errno.h. In the above example, the -13 code meant permission denied, typically because of missing execution rights.

This had been annoying me for a long time, and I am glad that the Linux kernel community accepted my improvement!

By the way, many more improvements to the Linux kernel from Bootlin are currently getting merged in 3.13. See all our contributions to the Linux kernel.

Linux 3.12 released, Bootlin 14th contributor by number of commits

The 3.12 kernel has just been released by Linus Torvalds, who summarized what he considers to be the major improvements offered by this release: improvements to the dynamic tick code, support infrastructure for DRM render nodes, TSO sizing and the FQ scheduler in the network layer, support for user namespaces in the XFS filesystem, multithreaded RAID5 in the MD subsystem, offline data deduplication in the Btrfs filesystem.

As usual, Bootlin contributed to the Linux kernel during this cycle, and according to the statistics at KPS, Bootlin is the 14th contributor in terms of number of commits, as a company. Bootlin contributed 185 patches to this kernel release, on a total of 10920 patches. Note that this classification includes the “Unknown” company which ranks first, gathering the contributions from all the contributors that are not known to be affiliated to any company.

The highlights of our contributions are:

Addition of support for the HX8369 LCD controller to the driver we had contributed earlier for the HX8357 LCD controller, in drivers/video/backlight/hx8357.c. These LCD controllers are used by the Crystalfontz i.MX28 boards, and this new development was done primarily by Alexandre Belloni.
Addition of a driver for the Nuvoton NAU7802 ADC chip on I2C, in drivers/iio/adc/nau7802.c. Some initial work was done by Maxime Ripard, but lots of debugging and additional work was done by Alexandre Belloni, who also pushed the driver to the mainline.
Added Device Tree information for the PMU unit on Atmel SAMA5D3 platforms, which allows to use perf on these platforms. Done by Alexandre Belloni.
Addition of a Device Tree binding to the mvebu-mbus driver, which controls the configuration of the MBus on Marvell EBU platforms (Armada 370/XP, Kirkwood, Dove, etc.). This binding took a lot of discussion time, and many iterations before reaching a state that was considered acceptable for mainline, but it has finally been merged in 3.12. The core of this work was done by Ezequiel Garcia, with several contributions from Thomas Petazzoni to convert existing platforms to the new APIs.
Many cleanups and improvements to the nand_pxa3xx driver, which for the moment is used for the NAND controller on PXA3xx, but that we are currently extending to also cover the NAND controller of Armada 370/XP platforms. In 3.12, only some cleanups have been integrated, and we are currently submitting the more important patches for mainline integration. This work was done by Ezequiel Garcia.
Cleanups, and conversion to CLOCKSOURCE_OF_DECLARE of the Armada 370/XP clocksource driver. Done by Ezequiel Garcia.
Extension of the Marvell I2C driver to use a new feature of the I2C controller found on Armada 370/XP, which allows to program an entire transaction at once, instead of having interrupts at each step of the transaction. This work was done by Gregory Clement.
The quest of removing unneeded ->init_irq() callbacks in machine descriptors continued, with Maxime Ripard removing 4 additional occurrences of this in mach-shmobile.
Cleanups and improvements to the sun4i clocksource driver, used on Allwinner SOCs. Done by Maxime Ripard.
Introduction of the initial support for the Allwinner A31 SOC and its WITS Columbus evaluation kit, as well as initial support for the Allwinner A20 SOC and the Olimex A20-Olinuxino-Micro and Cubieboard2 board, both based on the Allwinner A20 SOC. This includes clock support, pinctrl support, Ethernet support where applicable, and more. Work done by Maxime Ripard.
Michael Opdenacker continued his fight against IRQF_DISABLED and removed more occurrences of them. Michael also fixed a few issues in some Kconfig files.
Fixed big-endian issues in the Marvell mvneta Ethernet driver and the Marvell XOR driver, in preparation for the addition of big-endian support to the mach-mvebu platform. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Conversion of a few more Kirkwood platforms to the Device Tree, and removal of legacy support for other Kirkwood platforms that were already converted to the Device Tree. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Addition of the support for the Armada XP based AXP-WiFi AP board, from Marvell. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Improvements of the MSI infrastructure in the kernel: consolidation of code between architectures, addition of a registry of msi_chip. This preparatory work was needed to introduce MSI support for Armada 370/XP, which should hopefully make its way into 3.13. Work done by Thomas Petazzoni.

In details, our contributions were:

Crystalfontz boards support in Yocto

The Yocto 1.5 release is approaching and the Freescale layer trees are now frozen.
Bootlin added support for the various Crystalfontz boards to that release as you can check on the OpenEmbedded metadata index.

First some preparative work has been done in the meta-fsl-arm layer in order to add the required features to generate an image able to boot on the Crystalfontz boards:

Support for a newer version of the Barebox mainline, 2013.08.0. As the previously supported version of Barebox was too old, it didn’t include support for the Crystalfontz boards. Also, some work has been done to make the recipe itself more generic so that custom layers can reuse it more easily.
Inclusion of the patches allowing the imx-bootlets to boot Barebox. The imx-bootlets were only able to boot U-Boot or the Linux kernel until now.
Creation of a new image type, using the imx-bootlets, then Barebox to boot the Linux kernel. All the boards based on a Freescale mxs SoC (i.mx23 and i.mx28) will benefit of this new image type. This is actually the difficult part where you lay out the compiled binaries (bootloaders, kernel and root filesystem) in the final file that is an SD card image ready to be flashed.

Then, the recipes for the Crystalfontz boards have been added to the meta-fsl-arm-extra layer:

First the bootloaders, imx-bootlets and Barebox, including the specific patches and configurations for the Crystalfontz boards.
Then the kernel. The linux-cfa recipe uses the 3.10 based kernel available on github.
The machine configurations themselves, selecting Barebox as the bootloader and the correct kernel recipe. Also, these are choosing to install the kernel in the root filesystem instead of in its own partition.
Touchscreen calibration for the cfa-10057 and the cfa-10058 boards. This is required to get xinput-calibrator working properly as it can’t calibrate without starting values.

In a nut shell, you can now use the following commands to get a working image for your particular Crystalfontz board:

For your convenience, Freescale is providing a repo manifest to retrieve all the necessary git repositories. So first download and install repo:
mkdir ~/bin curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo chmod a+x ~/bin/repo PATH=${PATH}:~/bin
We will work in a directory named fsl-community-bsp:
mkdir fsl-community-bsp cd fsl-community-bsp
Ask repo to get the master branch, when Yocto 1.5 is released, you could select the new branch. (Edit: starting from September, 28th, you can use the branch named dora)
repo init -u https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform -b master
Download the layers:
repo sync
Configure the build for cfa-10036:
MACHINE=cfa10036 source ./setup-environment build
Start the build with:
bitbake core-image-minimal
Grab a cup of coffee!

You’ll end up with an image that you can flash using the following command:
sudo dd if=tmp/deploy/images/cfa10036/core-image-minimal-cfa10036.sdcard of=/dev/mmcblk0

Obviously, you need to replace cfa10036 by the board model you are using in the above commands. While not completely perfect, core-image-sato is also working.

In detail, the contributions from Bootlin are:

In meta-fsl-arm:
- Alexandre Belloni (6):
In meta-fsl-arm-extra:
- Alexandre Belloni (14):
In meta-fsl-base:
- Alexandre Belloni (1):
  - README: add crystalfontz boards

Buildroot 2013.08 released, new features and contributions from Bootlin

The 2013.08 release of Buildroot has been published a few days ago by Peter Korsgaard, the project maintainer. As usual, this release contains a number of improvements and new features that are summarized in Peter’s release e-mail, and also visible in the CHANGES file.

On a total of 744 commits merged for this release, Bootlin has contributed 141 patches, focusing on the following main improvements:

Conversion of the “internal toolchain back-end” of Buildroot to use the package infrastructure. The internal toolchain back-end is the piece of code in Buildroot that is responsible for building a cross-compilation toolchain (i.e building binutils, gcc, the C library, gdb and the necessary dependencies). Until now, this code was using some basic makefiles, many of which dating from many years back in the history of Buildroot. By converting this piece of code to use normal Buildroot packages, it is now easier to maintain and extend. It is worth noting that the internal toolchain back-end is only one of the two back-ends of Buildroot in terms of toolchains: it can also use pre-built external toolchains.
Thanks to the clean up highlighted above, we have added eglibc support to the internal toolchain back-end. Until now, using eglibc or glibc was only possible using pre-built external toolchains. Now, Buildroot is directly capable of building eglibc-based toolchains, in addition to the uClibc library which has been supported for many years by Buildroot. Note that we have already posted patches that also add glibc support, they should hopefully be included for the next release, 2013.11.
Vast improvements in the way Buildroot supports the various floating point possibilities on ARM: we’ve added support for the EABIhf ABI, improved how the various floating point units can be selected, etc. Selecting the right floating point solution for your embedded Linux system should now be a lot easier.
Support to build a system using the Thumb2 instruction set available on ARM, which provides a smaller code size compared to the classical ARM instruction set.
Updates to the available external toolchains: addition of the Arago ARMv5 and ARMv7 toolchains, and update the versions of the available Linaro toolchains for ARM and AArch64.
Addition of packages to support the video decoding hardware of some AT91 SoCs, the Hantro x170.

Moreover, in the absence of the official maintainer Peter Korsgaard, Thomas Petazzoni has played the role of interim maintainer during approximately one month, and has handled the first two release candidates of the 2013.08 cycle.

Last but not least, Thomas has also been the mentor of Spenser Gilliland, a student working on Buildroot as part of the Google Summer of Code. His work consists in improving support for ARM multimedia features in Buildroot, and a part of his work went into the 2013.08 release:

Addition of a libvpx package
Addition of a libopenmax virtual package to support various OpenMAX implementations
A complete bump of the Glib/Gtk stack
The addition of GStreamer 1.x support (Buildroot already had support for GStreamer 0.10.x, but not the more recent 1.x)
Addition of the gst-omx package which allows accelerated video decoding on the Raspberry Pi board thanks to an OpenMAX specific implementation
Addition of a ti-gfx package that allows to support OpenGL on TI OMAP platforms, it has been successfully tested with the BeagleBoard XM
Addition of the sunxi-mali package to support OpenGL on Allwinner SOCs, and the sunxi-cedarx package to support accelerated video decoding on Allwinner SOCs

The Google Summer of Code is still on-going until the end of September, and Spenser has already posted patches to improve support for Mesa3D, libdrm and the addition of the glmark2 OpenGL benchmark. Those improvements will hopefully be part of the next 2013.11 release.

In detail, the contributions from Bootlin for this release have been:

Bootlin the top #18 contributor to the 3.11 kernel

The 3.11 Linux kernel has now been released by Linus Torvalds, and as usual as thousands of patches coming from a large number of companies and contributors. For this release, Bootlin has contributed a total of 128 patches (yes, exactly 2^7), which makes Bootlin the 18th contributor in the list of companies contributing to the kernel, according to http://www.remword.com/kps_result/3.11_whole.html, before Broadcom and Cisco, and after ARM and Oracle. It is also the first time that six different engineers from Bootlin contribute code to the Linux kernel in a single release!

As usual, most of our contributions were centered around support for the Marvell Armada 370 and XP SOCs, the Allwinner SOCs and the Crystalfontz i.MX28 platforms:

Added support for the PCIe controllers of the Armada 370 and Armada XP platforms, and used it for the already supported Kirkwood platform. Supporting PCIe has been a very long process, which got started in December 2012, required long discussions with various kernel maintainers and multiple iterations of the patch series. Armada 370/XP was the first ARM platform to add Device Tree based PCIe support, and therefore this required many discussions to sort out the Device Tree bindings for PCIe controllers. This work was done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Enable an additional USB interface on the OpenBlocks AX3 platform, which is available as part of the mini-PCIe connector inside the device. This work was done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Cleaned up all the Kirkwood platform Device Tree files to assign the pin muxing configurations to the appropriate devices. This work was done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Made various cleanups and improvements in the Armada 370/XP platform code (in arch/arm/mach-mvebu) to make it possible to support different base address for the internal registers depending on the board being used. Many hardcoded physical addresses were removed, as well as the static virtual to physical mapping. This work was done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Cleaned up many ARM platforms to remove their unneeded ->init_irq() callback, and also the ->map_io() callback which we changed to default to calling debug_ll_io_init() when not provided. This work was done by Maxime Ripard.
Extended the ssd1307fb driver that we contributed a few releases ago to also support the SSD1306 device. The SSD1306 and SSD1307 are OLED screens controlled over I2C that are used on Crystalfontz i.MX28 platforms. We also optimized significantly the communication with the SSD130x devices. This work was done by Maxime Ripard.
Added an Ethernet driver for the Allwinner SOCs. The work was initially done by Stefan Roese, and our engineer Maxime Ripard did all the final cleanup, development of an MDIO driver, and integration with all the Device Tree files of the Allwinner platforms.
Added support for the Allwinner I2C controller, by re-using and extending the existing i2c-mv64xxx driver used on Marvell platforms, since the hardware block was very similar. The Allwinner Device Tree files were also updated to add the I2C controllers. This work was done by Maxime Ripard.
Added basic support for the Allwinner A10s SOC: pin muxing information and Device Tree information. This work was done by Maxime Ripard.
Added support for the Olimex A10s-Olinuxino-micro, a new hardware platform manufactured by Olimex that uses the Allwinner A10s SOC. This work was done by Maxime Ripard.
Implemented a “Device Bus” driver for the Marvell SOCs, that allows to configure the access to NOR flash and other devices connected to the memory bus. It has been used to enabled NOR support on the Armada XP DB development platform. This work was done by Ezequiel Garcia.
Fixed a few bugs in the IIO subsystem, and a build failure on AT91 platform when CONFIG_PHYLIB was not enabled. This work was done by Alexandre Belloni.
Fixed the ARM low-level code that handles compatibility with ATAG bootloaders, to properly convert 32 bits memory sizes passed by the bootloader into 64 bits cells of the Device Tree, when LPAE is used. This work was done by Gregory Clement.
Michael Opdenacker made a few improvements and fixes to the documentation.

For the upcoming 3.12, we already have 131 patches lined up, and a few more will probably show up after this blog post is written. Over the last release cycles, Bootlin has become a regular contributor to ARM support in the Linux kernel, and we’re looking forward to doing more contributions in the future.

The details of our 3.11 contributions is:

Contributions to Barebox: initial Marvell SoC support

Barebox is a bootloader that strives to be a modern alternative to U-Boot. It currently supports ARM, Blackfin, MIPS, NIOS2, OpenRISC, PowerPC and x86 as CPU architectures, and while it doesn’t have as much hardware support as U-Boot yet, it does have a number of very significant advantages over U-Boot: a proper device model very similar to the one used in the Linux kernel, which makes the code very clean and nice, and a configuration system that uses kconfig, like the Linux kernel, which is a lot better than the per-board header files used by U-Boot with lots of cryptic macros.

Bootlin had already contributed to Barebox in the past, as our engineer Maxime Ripard added the support for the Crystalfontz i.MX28 boards.

More recently, we contributed basic support for the Marvell Kirkwood, Marvell Armada 370 and Marvell Armada XP ARM processors. This work was released as part of the 2013.07.0 release. For now, the support is fairly minimal, as it only allows to boot a Barebox bootloader that has serial port support. The most important part of the work was to write a kwbimage tool (see kwbimage.c), which allows to generate bootable images for Marvell processors. Our work contained minimal support for the Armada XP-based OpenBlocks AX3 board, the Armada XP-based GP development board, the Armada 370-based Mirabox from Globalscale and the Kirkwood-based Guruplug from Globalscale. Our work was quickly extended by Sebastian Hesselbarth, who added basic support for the Marvell Dove processor, and the Cubox platform from SolidRun, which uses the Dove processor.

Of course, such support is far from being complete, we are hoping in the future to add support for network, NAND and SD, in order to make Barebox really useful and usable on Marvell platforms.

The details of our contributions are:

Thomas Petazzoni (17):

Bootlin contributions to the 3.10 kernel

The 3.10 Linux kernel has been released a few days ago. According to LWN, with almost 13.500 non-merge commits, the 3.10 has been the busiest ever, and also the fastest. Bootlin engineers again contributed to this release, with 99 patches integrated, making Bootlin the 28th most active company contributing, right between ST-Ericsson (103 patches) and ARM (97 patches). See http://www.remword.com/kps_result/3.10_whole.html for the complete statistics.

This time, Bootlin contributions include:

LPAE support for the Marvell Armada XP SoC, done by Grégory Clement.
Fix for errata 4742 of the PJ4B CPU core (used in Armada 370/XP), which prevented booting Armada 370 platforms after ARM optimized some TLB operations. Done by Grégory Clement.
Support for NOR flash on Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoC, done by Ezequiel Garcia
Addition of a mvebu-mbus driver to handle the address decoding mechanism and configurable memory windows of Marvell SoC. The mach-kirkwood, mach-orion5x, mach-dove, mach-mv78xx0 and mach-mvebu Marvell platforms are all converted to use it. Developping this driver was a requirement to enable PCIe in a Device Tree compatible way on these platforms. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Addition of Device Tree information for the PCIe controllers of the Armada 370 and Armada XP, but unfortunately not the PCIe driver itself (which will arrive in 3.11). Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
Support for the thermal sensor on Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoC, done by Ezequiel Garcia
A lot of reorganization of the Device Tree compatible strings for the Allwinner ARM SoC support, to prepare for the addition of additional SoCs in the future. Done by Maxime Ripard.
Improvements to the Allwinner pinctrl driver, with support for the A10 and A13 SoC. Done by Maxime Ripard.
Enabling of the I2C GPIO expander of the Armada 370 based Mirabox platform. Done by Grégory Clement.
A few updates to the support for the i.MX28 Crystalfontz boards: touchscreen and one-wire support on CFA10049. Done by Alexandre Belloni.
Various cleanups and improvements to the OMAP GMPC driver, done by Ezequiel Garcia.
Various cleanups and improvements to the Marvell Armada 370/XP IRQ controller driver, done by Thomas Petazzoni.

In detail, the contributions are:

Buildroot 2013.05 released, Bootlin contributions inside!

As planned by the release schedule, the Buildroot 2013.05 version landed at the end of May. Peter Korsgaard, the project’s maintainer, highlighted the most important additions in his release email. With more than 900 commits, it has been the busiest ever development cycle, showing that the Buildroot project is more and more active.

With 175 commits in this release, Bootlin has again participated significantly to the development of Buildroot:

   217  Gustavo Zacarias
   167  Thomas Petazzoni (Bootlin)
   109  Will Wagner
    86  Peter Korsgaard
    44  Simon Dawson
    27  Yann E. MORIN
    25  gilles.talis@gmail.com
[...]
     6  Maxime Ripard (Bootlin)
[...]
     1  Alexandre Belloni (Bootlin)
     1  Ezequiel Garcia (Bootlin)
[...]

Amongst the features and improvements contributed by Bootlin:

Support for the next generation Wayland display server has been added. For now, only Wayland over the framebuffer is supported, but additional improvements are expected to come in the future.
Integration of packages to build all the Qt5 components: qt5base, qt5declarative, qt5graphicaleffects, qt5imageformats, qt5jsbackends, qt5multimedia, qt5quick1, qt5script, qt5svg, qt5webkit and qt5xmlpatterns.
A mechanism of virtual packages to expose the OpenGL, OpenVG and EGL implementations has been put in place, with for now the RasberryPi providing such implementations. Those virtual packages are for example used in the Qt5 packages mentionned above, for those that require OpenGL.
A cleanup of Buildroot core dependencies: flex and bison are no longer mandatory to use Buildroot, they are automatically built when needed. This apparently simple move required a number of fixes and updated to a significant number of packages.
Many external toolchains were updated, especially the Linaro toolchains.
The build process of gdb was converted to the package infrastructure, instead of being a hand-written Makefile. This is part of an effort to progressively convert the toolchain building process to the package infrastructure.
A default configuration was added for the Atmel AT91SAM9G45M10-EK evaluation board, which allows Buildroot users to easily build a minimal working system for this platform.
A number of build issues were fixed by Maxime Ripard, thanks to the daily automated builds done by the Bootlin Jenkins system that Maxime has set up.
A huge number of build issues trigerred by the autobuilders have also been fixed thanks to Bootlin engineers contributions.

In addition to this, Thomas Petazzoni has done some major improvements to the automated build system that the Buildroot project uses, which he detailed in an e-mail sent to the project mailing list. These improvements make the autobuilder infrastructure more scalable, and allows to provide statistics, and a much better daily report sent to the project’s mailing list.

In detail, the contributions of Bootlin were:

Bootlin contributions to the 3.9 kernel

A few months ago, we published a blog post showing our contributions to the 3.8 Linux kernel. With 128 commits merged in 3.8, Bootlin was ranked as the 17th company in terms of kernel contributions.

The 3.9 kernel has been released a few weeks ago, with again a significant number of contributions from Bootlin. According to these statistics, Bootlin contributed 92 patches during the 3.9 cycle, making the company the 26th most important contributor to the Linux kernel for this release, and this time, five engineers from Bootlin contributed patches.

Among the contributions that we made:

Added a basic infrastructure for irqchip drivers in the drivers/irqchip directory. This directory is now used to store the drivers for the IRQ controllers of various processors.
Made a number of improvements to the Marvell SDIO driver, including the addition of a Device Tree binding for it, and enabled its usage on Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP platforms, as well as converting the Marvell Kirkwood platforms to use Device Tree probing instead of legacy probing for their SDIO interface.
Contributed a number of improvements to support Crystalfontz i.MX28 based modules, including the Device Tree for the CFA10037 expansion board, various improvements for the CFA10049 expansion boards, and a driver for the Himax HX8357B LCD controller.
A large number of improvements to the support of the Allwinner ARM SoCs, most notably a pinctrl driver for those SoCs, which allows to configure the muxing of I/O pins, and a gpio driver, to use the pins as general-purpose I/Os. We also contributed the support for the Miniand Hackberry platform, based on an Allwinner SoC. This work is all done by our engineer Maxime Ripard, who is the maintainer of the Allwinner SoC support in the Linux kernel.
Improvements to the PCA953x driver (for I2C GPIO expanders) in order to support the PCA9505 chip, that has 40 GPIOs. This required quite some work, as the PCA953x was originally limited to chips having at most 32 GPIOs. This improvement was done in order to support the GPIO expander box provided by Globalscale for the Armada 370-based Mirabox platform.
We added support for the Real Time Clock on Armada 370 and Armada XP based platforms, added support for local timers on Armada XP, added support for the new Armada XP GP evaluation board.
We enabled support for the SPI controllers and the USB controllers on Armada 370 and Armada XP based platforms.

Our high rate of contributions is going to continue, as we already have 95 patches merged for the upcoming 3.10 kernel and have already submitted a number of patches for the 3.11 kernel.

Here are details about our contributions to the 3.9 kernel: