System Image Build Process and Demo Video

Over the last week, we worked on the bringup of the first MNT Reform 2.0 beta unit that will be sent out to a customer. I used the opportunity to update and polish the system image build process and out-of-the-box experience when you first boot MNT Reform from the SD card.

The build process is based on Debian Multistrap and performs the following steps:

• Clones the Linux kernel, applies our patches (until they are upstreamed), Device Tree, and builds it.
• Clones our fork of U-Boot (until upstreamed) and builds it.
• Calls Multistrap to create a root filesystem (userland) with a set of default applications.
• Populates the userland with the Kernel and DTS, some sensible default settings, and a user skeleton with help files and a user-friendly default configuration for the Sway tiling window manager/compositor. This also includes a real-time CPU and Disk I/O activity monitor I wrote yesterday (pardon my newbie Python 3).
• Steps into the userland via chroot (supported by QEMU on a non-ARM build platform) and clones and compiles newer versions of Mesa, X/XWayland with a graphics bugfix, Sway, and Waybar.
• Copies the completed userland into an image file and installs the U-Boot bootloader to block 66 (that's where i.MX8MQ's boot ROM expects it).

The resulting reform-system.img can then be written to an SD card that any MNT Reform can boot.

In addition to all the theory, here’s an unedited video I recorded directly off the HDMI output of my personal MNT Reform to give you a sense of the look, feel, and speed of the default installation. Some delays when starting bigger applications are the result of not loading from a fast NVMe disk but directly off of the SD card. Also note that the colors are washed out as a side-effect of the 60 FPS USB video capture. On the real display, everything is nice and crisp.

Libre Lounge Podcast Episode

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for the Libre Lounge podcast by Serge Wroclawski. Libre Lounge is a podcast about "various topics involving user freedom, crossing free software, free culture, network and hosting freedom, and libre hardware designs." In this episode, I talk about my personal background in software and hardware, how I came to Free Software and Linux, and some future directions for Reform:

https://librelounge.org/episodes/39-mnt-reform-with-lukas-hartmann.html

Blob-Free H.264 Video Decoding

Did you know that i.MX8MQ (the default System-on-Chip of MNT Reform) has built-in hardware video decoders? Due to recent development work by Ezequiel Garcia, Philipp Zabel et al, Linux 5.7 includes support for the Hantro H.264 (and MPEG-2) decoder block via the video4linux infrastructure. Recent builds of gstreamer can already leverage the code to play back H.264 video on MNT Reform without significant CPU usage.

Save the Date: AMA on June 3rd

As part of the campaign, the MNT Reform team (at least Greta and me) will be available for an AMA (ask-me-anything) on the Crowd Supply Discord Server this Wednesday, June 3rd at 1pm Pacific Time. Here’s the link to the Discord channel: https://discord.gg/eFGkjjK. And here’s a link that will translate to your local time: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=MNT+Reform+AMA&iso=20200603T13&p1=202&ah=1. We are looking forward to all of your questions.