ARM Linux Kernels and Graphics Drivers on Popular 'Open' Hardware: Bleeding Edge vs. Vendor Blobs and Kernel Forks - How much is in Mainline, and How Open is Open?

This talk will cover the current state of open source support on several popular ARM boards and their variants.  Primary components include accelerated support for graphics hardware, mainline kernel support (largely device tree files and their "completeness"), and upstream (DENX) u-boot support.  The current state of mainline kernel/u-boot support and associated patches, along with the current build/deploy process, will be covered in detail for several popular open source boards/variants, including:

•  ARMv7 HardFloat VFP/NEON
•     -  wanboard / udoo - iMX.6 quad core, Vivante GPU
•     - beaglebone black / white - AM335X single core, OMAP3 / SGX GPU, PRUs
•     - Sunxi mk802-II 1GB TV stick - Allwinner A10 single core, Mali GPU
•     - Samsung Chromebook - Exynos5 dual core, Mali GPU
•     - Genesi SmartBook - Freescale iMX.5 single core,  AMD z430 GPU
•  ARMv7 HardFloat VFP (no NEON)
•     - Trimslice Diskless - NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core CPU/GPU
•  ARMv6 HardFloat VFP (no NEON)
•     - Raspberry Pi - Broadcom SoC single core, VideoCore IV GPU

The same ganeral build/deploy process is followed on several different machines, with minor differences in u-boot and/or SDCard partitions, while required kernel patches are unique to each machine.  Several distribution options are available for the rootfs deployment, including Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Yocto/Openembedded, and more.  Custom builds and bootstrapping are also dicussed/demonstrated.