• Latest Update
• Benefits
• Software Stack Components
• Building and Testing DSP stack
• Preparation
• Build
• Boot
• Test
• Instruction Difference for Build and Run Froyo+DSP
• Preparation
• Build
• Boot
• Known Issues
• Some Observations

Latest Update

• 05/31/2011 - rowboat-gingerbread-dsp.xml is available (for DM37x EVM and Beagleboard-xM only).
• similar to the features in rowboat-froyo-dsp.xml, but uses Stagefright multimedia framework instead of OpenCORE;
• Support up-to 720P MPEG4 ASP decoding @30fps @10Mbps;
• Support up-to 720P H.264 HP Lvl3.1 decoding @24fps @4Mbps;
• requires 1GHz DM37xx device to support 720P video decoding;
• OMAP3530 is not supported at the moment;
• 01/23/2011 - rowboat-froyo-dsp.xml updated TI DVSDK package to v4.01.00.09.

Benefits

The OMAP3530 or DM3730 has a powerful C64x+ DSP core embedded in the SoC. This DSP core can be used for various purposes, including multimedia decoding/encoding. This offloads the host ARM processor for other general processing tasks and enables decoding of higher bitrate and/or higher resolution video and audio than would otherwise be achievable with Android running on ARM only.

Rowboat DSP support is based on the TI Linux Digital Video Software Development Kit (DVSDK) for the OMAP3530/DM3730.

Software Stack Components

The following components form a complete software stack needed to work efficiently with DSP. They are provided together as the TI DVSDK or they can be downoaded as individual packages directly from TI.

1. DSP/BIOS (and tools)
• A TI provided realtime operating system for DSP's
• DSP/BIOS information on TI E2E
• Wikipedia Overview of DSP/BIOS
2. Codec Engine (and tools)
• A TI provided framework to enable instantiation/control of Codecs running on DSP from the ARM
• http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Category:Codec_Engine
3. DSP/BIOS Link
• TI provided driver provided low-level communications between the ARM and the DSP
• DSP/BIOS Link Training Material
4. DMAI
• The DaVinci Multimedia Application Interface (DMAI) is a thin utility layer on top of the operating system (Linux or DSP/BIOS) and the Codec Engine (CE) to assist in quickly writing portable applications on a DaVinci (or OMAP) platform.
• http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Davinci_Multimedia_Application_Interface
5. OpenCore DMAI Codecs
• Integration of TI DSP accelerated codecs into the PacketVideo OpenCore framework that is provided here on the rowboat Android development site.
• Technical Details available here
6. additional DSP codecs (optional), for example, mp3 DSP codec

Building and Testing DSP stack

This section explains how to build and run Gingerbread+DSP on DM37x devices. The next section provides the difference for Froyo+DSP on DM37x and OMAP35x devices.

Preparation

1. Rowboat is patched to be built on 32-bit Linux host only.
2. Check if you have git, java6-jdk, dos2unix, and expect utilities installed on your build host. Use the which command from the Linux prompt to see if they commands are present (i.e. which git)
3. Download repo. You can find detailed repo installing instructions here. Make sure ~/bin is in $PATH

# mkdir -p ~/bin
# curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
# chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

4. Download Rowboat Android (Gingerbread version) with integrated TI DSP stack from gitorious.org/rowboat. Please ensure you have atleast 17GB free space on your hard drive for the source and build temporary files.

# mkdir ~/rowboat-android
# cd ~/rowboat-android
# repo init -u git://gitorious.org/rowboat/manifest.git -m rowboat-gingerbread-dsp.xml
# repo sync

5. Manually download the TI DVSDK package to the external/ti-dsp folder from the table in webpage http://software-dl.ti.com/dsps/dsps_public_sw/sdo_sb/targetcontent/dvsdk/DVSDK_4_00/4_01_00_09/index_FDS.html. Registration might be needed.
• For DM37xx platform, download dvsdk_dm3730-evm_4_01_00_09_setuplinux package;
• For OMAP35xx platform, download dvsdk_omap3530-evm_4_01_00_09_setuplinux package.

Build

If English is not the locale in your host machine, some package install scripts will fail due to unexpected non-English output. Set env LANG as following to fix it:

# export LANG=C 

To build Android with TI DSP stack use following command. It builds Android and Linux kernel for the selected platform, TI kernel modules for DSP communication and codec server, and SGX drivers as while.

# cd ~/rowboat-android
# make TARGET_PRODUCT=[omap3evm | beagleboard] [OMAPES=5.x]

Your must specify your board with TARGET_PRODUCT variable. OMAPES variable is set to 5.x by default to build for DM37xx only.

Create the rootfs image, assuming TARGET_PRODUCT=omap3evm in the command above:

# cd out/target/product/omap3evm
# mkdir android_rootfs
# cp -r root/* system android_rootfs
# ../../../../build/tools/mktarball.sh ../../../host/linux-x86/bin/fs_get_stats android_rootfs . rootfs rootfs.tar.bz2

For DM37x EVM, download the TI Gingerbread Devkit 1.0 DM37x Prebuilt Image Package and untar it to get MLO and u-boot images, which are DM37X/Boot_Images/MLO and DM37X/Boot_Images/u-boot.bin respectively.

# wget http://software-dl.ti.com/dsps/dsps_public_sw/sdo_tii/TI_Android_DevKit/TI_Android_GingerBread_2_3_DevKit_1_0/exports/DM37X.tar.gz
# tar zxf DM37X.tar.gz

To get MLO and u-boot.bin for Beagleboard-xM, download the Beagleboard-xM Gingerbread prebuilt image package.

Follow the instructions in ConfigureAndBuild#Prepare_SD_card to populate the rootfs to a SD card. Before copying uImage to the SD card, first copy MLO to the SD card first partition; also copy u-boot.bin into the same partition. MLO has to be copied first, otherwise the board will not boot.

How to Make 3 Partition SD Card wiki is an alternative reference to populate rowboat to a SD card.

Boot

DVSDK DSP stack by default uses physical memory window within the first 128MB. In order not to change DSP stack mappings we recommend to use memory hole settings as in the examples below for boards with more than 128MB DDR. (Don't forget to adjust these parameters for your board)

Boards with 128MB of memory are not tested and not recommended.

You'll probably have kernel crash issue due to v4l2 buffer allocation failure with the omap_vout driver in some cases. To avoid this, try following bootargs additions: omap_vout.vid1_static_vrfb_alloc=y.

The following is an example of u-boot env setup for DM3730 EVM with 256MB DDR to boot from SD card. (It includes artificial line breaks to maintain a print-friendly document.) 'mpurate=1000' is necessary to decode 720P video clips. Please use 1GHz verified DM37x devices, otherwise DSP will crash while running at 1GHz.

OMAP3_EVM# setenv bootcmd 'mmc init; fatload mmc 0 80800000 uImage; bootm 80800000'
OMAP3_EVM# setenv bootargs 'mem=76M@0x80000000 mem=128M@0x88000000 console=tty0
console=ttyS0,115200n8 androidboot.console=ttyS0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext3
init=/init rootwait ip=off omap_vout.vid1_static_vrfb_alloc=y
omapdss.def_disp=dvi omapfb.mode=dvi:1280x720MR-16 mpurate=1000'
OMAP3_EVM# saveenv

The configuration in the example above sets the display to the DVI port. For more details of display mode see modedb Documentation.

Test

To test media playback copy media files to the third partition of the SD card and use 'Music player' or 'Gallery' UI applications in rowboat. Supported formats are available on OMX DSP-accelerated audio/video codecs wiki page. Check for 'omx-dsp' tag in logcat to see that accelerated codecs are enabled.

If you have any video clip which should be supported but cannot play on rowboat, please try to extract the video elementary stream and play it with the DVSDK decode demo.

The top command shows the ARM load on DM3730@1GHz is about 4~8% when playing H.264@HP video clips in 720P resolution with AAC codec running on ARM side.

Instruction Difference for Build and Run Froyo+DSP

Preparation

java5-jdk is required for compiling Froyo. (Since Gingerbread java6-jdk is required.)

Use manifest rowboat-froyo-dsp.xml to download Froyo source from Rowboat.

Build

To build Rowboat Froyo+DSP use the following command:

# make TARGET_PRODUCT=[omap3evm | beagleboard | igepv2] [OMAPES=(2.x|3.x|5.x)]

Your must specify your board with TARGET_PRODUCT variable. Set OMAPES variable to install proper version of SGX drivers (Default is 3.x):

OMAPES=2.x, for OMAP3530 ES1 or ES2;
OMAPES=3.x, for OMAP3530 ES3.0;
OMAPES=5.x, for DM37x

To get MLO and u-boot.bin for OMAP35x/DM37x EVM, download the TI Froyo Devkit 2.2 DM37x prebuilt image package. To get the same for Beagleboard-xM, download the Beagleboard-xM Froyo prebuilt image package.

Boot

For DM37x EVM and Beagleboard-xM, use the following memory hole setup in bootargs.

 'mem=68M@0x80000000 mem=128M@0x88000000'

For OMAP35x EVM and Beagleboard, use the following memory hole setup in bootargs.

 'mem=104M@0x80000000 mem=128M@0x88000000'

Known Issues

• dragging the playback progress bar causes a/v out of sync with some video clips (in Froyo only);

Some Observations

• Sometimes Jave VM complains about SIGSEGV during compiling rowboat. Please re-run the make command if it happens.
• If there is any failure while compiling dvsdk packages, and you want to redo a clean dvsdk build, please delete external/ti-dsp/already_clean and external/ti-dsp/ti-dvsdk_<version>/ and re-run the build command. If external/ti-dsp/already_clean exists, the build script will not install and patch dvsdk packages again. Please refer to the top level Makefile for details.