OE Build of glmark2 Running on Cubietruck with Mali

Here are the steps you can perform to use OpenEmbedded to build an image for the Cubietruck in order to run the glmark2-es2 benchmark accelerated via the binary-only mali user-space driver.

First off, grab the scripts that will guide you through your build:

$ git clone git://github.com/twoerner/oe-layerindex-config.git
Cloning into 'oe-layerindex-config'...
remote: Counting objects: 45, done.
remote: Total 45 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 45
Receiving objects: 100% (45/45), 11.04 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (24/24), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

Kick off the build configuration by sourcing the main script

$ . oe-layerindex-config/oesetup.sh

This script will use wget to grab some items from the OpenEmbedded layer index, then ask you which branch you would like to use:

Choose "master".

Then you'll be asked which board you'd like to build for:

 Scroll down and choose "cubietruck". At this point the scripts will download meta-sunxi for you and configure your build to use this BSP layer by adding it to your bblayers.conf.

Now you need to choose your distribution:

Select "meta-yocto". Now this layer will be fetched and added to your build. Since meta-yocto includes a number of poky variants we will be asked to choose one:

Select "poky".

We now need to tell our build where it can place its downloads (notice the question at the bottom of the following screen):

You can enter your download directory. This entry box uses readline which, among other things, allows you to use tab-completion when entering your download path. I would recommend using a fully-qualified path for this information. It is common to use one location for all the downloads of all builds taking place on a given machine.

Now your configuration step is mostly finished:

If you simply wanted to perform a small core-image-minimal build, you could go ahead and bitbake that up now. But we want to add glmark2 to our image, and its metadata isn't found in the layers we currently have. Therefore we need to add one more layer:

Before we can build, we need to tweak our configuration to let bitbake know which kernel we want to use, which u-boot we want to use, what packages we want to add to our image, and so forth. Edit conf/local.conf and make yours look similar to:

Now we are ready to build!

$ bitbake core-image-full-cmdline

When our build completes there are some warnings that are issued, we can safely ignore these for now:

We will find our artifacts in:

Simply dd the sdimg to a microSD card:

# dd if=core-image-full-cmdline-cubietruck.sunxi-sdimg of=/dev/<your microSD device> bs=1M

Note that on some distributions you have to be the root user to perform the above step and that you need to figure out what jumble of letters to fill in for the <your microSD device> part.

Pop the microSD into the cubietruck's microSD slot, attach an HDMI monitor, a 3.3V console cable, and apply power.

When the device finishes booting you can now run the glmark2-es2 demo. Unfortunately it only works in full-screen mode. If you want to see which tests it is currently running and the current FPS count while the tests are running you can specify the --annotate option.

There are two common ways to do this:

1. plug a USB keyboard into the cubietruck and type the command into the matchbox-terminal console
• # glmark2-es2 --fullscreen --annotate
2. from the serial console run:
• # export DISPLAY=:0
• # glmark2-es2 --fullscreen --annotate

There is also a "sunximali-test" demo app you can try.

Build Help

If you're having trouble building there are a couple things you can try

• If this is your first time using OpenEmbedded or you're rather new to it, you could try familiarizing yourself with the project and more basic builds to start:
•  https://www.yoctoproject.org
•  https://www.yoctoproject.org/documentation
•  http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/1.8/yocto-project-qs/yocto-project-qs.html
• In the build screenshot you can see the exact repositories my build is using, and what the latest commit was for each. You could try checking out those exact same commits for each of the layers being used to see if that helps.

The build configuration for this build is:
Build Configuration:
BB_VERSION        = "1.27.1"
BUILD_SYS         = "x86_64-linux"
NATIVELSBSTRING   = "openSUSE-project-13.2"
TARGET_SYS        = "arm-poky-linux-gnueabi"
MACHINE           = "cubietruck"
DISTRO            = "poky"
DISTRO_VERSION    = "1.8+snapshot-20150930"
TUNE_FEATURES     = "arm armv7a vfp neon callconvention-hard vfpv4 cortexa7"
TARGET_FPU        = "vfp-vfpv4-neon"
meta-sunxi        = "master:14da837096f2c4bf1471b9cce5cf7fd30f55999b"
meta              = "master:4a1dec5c61f73e7cfa430271ed395094bb262f6b"
meta-yocto        = "master:613c38fb9b5f20a89ca88f6836a21b9c7604e13e"
meta-oe           = "master:f4533380c8a5c1d229f692222ee0c2ef9d187ef8"

The conf/local.conf is:
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel = "linux-sunxi"
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_u-boot = "u-boot-sunxi"
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/bootloader = "u-boot-sunxi"
DEFAULTTUNE = "cortexa7hf-neon-vfpv4"
CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL = "packagegroup-core-x11-base sunxi-mali-test glmark2"
MACHINE_EXTRA_RRECOMMENDS = " kernel-modules"
IMAGE_FSTYPES_remove = "tar.bz2"
DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " x11"
PACKAGECONFIG_pn-glmark2 = "x11-gles2"
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_jpeg = "jpeg"
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_jpeg-native = "jpeg-native"
PACKAGE_CLASSES ?= "package_ipk"
EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES = "debug-tweaks"
USER_CLASSES ?= "buildstats image-mklibs image-prelink"
PATCHRESOLVE = "noop"
OE_TERMINAL = "auto"
BB_DISKMON_DIRS = "\
    STOPTASKS,${TMPDIR},1G,100K \
    STOPTASKS,${DL_DIR},1G,100K \
    STOPTASKS,${SSTATE_DIR},1G,100K \
    ABORT,${TMPDIR},100M,1K \
    ABORT,${DL_DIR},100M,1K \
    ABORT,${SSTATE_DIR},100M,1K"
PACKAGECONFIG_append_pn-qemu-native = " sdl"
PACKAGECONFIG_append_pn-nativesdk-qemu = " sdl"
ASSUME_PROVIDED += "libsdl-native"
CONF_VERSION = "1"