Successful TomTom Visit

As indicated before, TomTom B.V. has invited Christian and me to visit them at their offices. Apart from some consulting/training regarding Free Software Licenses and the Free Software Community, they were particularly interested in getting us involved with their Linux kernel related development.

I stressed the fact that it is very important to clean up all the drivers, make them use standard interfaces and eventually get them merged to the mainline kernel. As it seems, they agree and want to contract one or some of the OpenTom developers to do so.

No more time for OpenTom at the moment

Due to an increasing workload, I won't be able to work on the OpenTom project for at least some weeks. I've published the current state of the SD Card driver in my personal directory of the OpenTom Subversion repository. If you want to pick up, feel free. I'll answer questions by email.

wiki.opentom.org online

We've put together some information on our OpenTom efforts at wiki.opentom.org. Feel free to check it out. Additions of content very welcome :)

More hacking on the SD Card driver

re-engineering the SD card stuff turns out to be more time consuming than expected. Not that it's particularly fancy or complicated - just obfuscated. Apparently there are some quite complex data structures involved, that are hard to analyze by looking at the disassembly.

All GPL issues with TomTom B.V. settled

I'm very happy that the GPL issues with TomTom have now all been settled, and despite some early disagreements we're now very happy with the way TomTom has handled this case.

The TomTom GPL page contains the latest source of their 4.42 firmware. Pretty much all of the drivers have been released with their source code (touch-screen, framebuffer, USB device, accelerometer, GPS). Only (obviously) the SD-Card driver is missing in the source and provided as kernel module. This is due to the stupid SD Card Alliance licensing agreement, which basically puts every recipient of the Documentation under an NDA.

So at the moment you have to put all of the OS into the initrd, which is loaded by the bootloader.

We're working on a solution for the card reader, though. At least MMC Card support should be available soon.

The OpenTom Project was founded

Our distributed efforts in opening up the TomTom GO have now found a common home, the opentom.org domain. There's the OpenTom website and the svn.opentom.org subversion server.

There's still a lot under construction, expect more news here in this blog and in the subversion repository.

2.6.10-rc1 kernel for OpenTom

Christian Daniel has managed to get 2.6.10-rc1 running on the TomTom GO. This includes a 2.6.x-rewritten frame buffer driver, USB Host and Device support.

The kernel tree has been made available on svn.opentom.org.