More fennec on e-ink and Midori-webkit too

So it turns out that learning a bit about when and where to click in an application helps make it behave better. :-) So another Fennec on E-Ink video, this time it feels more like a usable mobile browser. I haven't gotten hildon built yet so no on-screen keyboard input yet. I'm feeling more excited about this stuff. The cooperation between X and the kernel makes everything else work without modification.



You're probably going to ask, so you've tried Fennec, what about a webkit based mobile browser? Well, I couldn't find any that I could build for my Gumstix. If you have a suggestion, please let meknow. However, I did try Midori-webkit-gtk which works quite well if I ignore the lack of a touchscreen friendly user interface. It did better than Fennec in terms of memory consumption and was able to render more sites as far as I could tell. I've posted this Midori-webkit-gtk on E-Ink video.

Fennec on e-ink

I've been trying to get fennec to work on broadsheetfb. Here's my current status as a brief video clip.


As you can tell, that's far from perfect. Memory profile:

Name:   fennec
State:  R (running)
Tgid:   1330
Pid:    1330
PPid:   652
TracerPid:      0
Uid:    0       0       0       0
Gid:    0       0       0       0
FDSize: 32
Groups: 0
VmPeak:    95848 kB
VmSize:    95848 kB
VmLck:         0 kB
VmHWM:     38372 kB
VmRSS:     37348 kB
VmData:    57524 kB
VmStk:        84 kB
VmExe:        84 kB
VmLib:     34612 kB
VmPTE:        72 kB

My device now has:
MemTotal: 61560 kB
MemFree: 2484 kB

I see illegal instruction failures when trying to render various web sites which I presume are due to memory allocation failures encountered by Fennec. Further, I see this stuff:
Alignment trap: fennec (1574) PC=0x40816a30 Instr=0xe1c860d8 Address=0x406503a4 FSR 0x013
Alignment trap: fennec (1574) PC=0x40816a58 Instr=0xe1c860f8 Address=0x406503a4 FSR 0x813
Alignment trap: fennec (1574) PC=0x408169ec Instr=0xe1c060d8 Address=0x406503a4 FSR 0x013
Alignment trap: fennec (1574) PC=0x40816a30 Instr=0xe1c860d8 Address=0x406503a4 FSR 0x013

I think I need a tofuier device than Gumstix in order to get fennec comfortable. So far I still haven't found one that I can afford. Still hoping someone will drop me a message on that. Alternatively, I guess I could investigate thinner browsers.

Happy Pongal

தைப்பொங்கல் வாழ்த்துக்கள். I really wanted to finish this before Pongal but instead I'm one day late. Anyway, I've posted my improved demo of broadsheetfb. I've reduced latency quite a lot (I haven't measured but it should be quite significant) and the more important change is host cpu utilization is now a lot lower. I've posted a video of this here and you can contrast that with the demo that I made during CELF. I've posted code for both the things that I did to improve this. The gpiolib changes need to be split to make review easier and hopefully I'll then be able to convince everyone that its a decent idea and not shortsighted. I've also just posted the damage interface code. I'm very excited about these displays and watching them improve is great fun.

22 pins of GPIO or more

Hi there,

Are you a vendor of embedded boards with a recent CPU? If you happen to have a development board that has exposed 22 pins of GPIO or more, then I'd really like to chat with you. What do you get out of this? :-) The opportunity to have your board interfaced to a very new display technology which could provide potentially attractive pictures that I have permission to give to you and which you can use as you see fit for your marketing purposes. Plus, I'll, of course, put effort into getting your board playing well with Linux. Drop me a note.

Thanks!

ps: if your board only has 16 exposed cleanly, but you happen to have about 5 spare LEDs on the board or alternate outputs then that's viable too. I don't mind reworking anything myself as long as its surface traces with a pitch that can accommodate a trembler.

From metronomefb